[dependsontheq]

While I agree that it would have been sensible to phase out coal and then nuclear, the german position is more complex. The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden. Up to today boar and mushrooms have an elevated level of radiation in the forests around my home. So this is the emotional background, the risks are not far away. Fukushima gave the debate another spin „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.

I still thank shutting them off is wrong but I think there’s a lot of history in that decision. And it’s much more history than one party deciding that.

[Cwizard]

> „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.

I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes? Which are essentially non-existent in Germany?

In my opinion Fukushima should be an argument _for_ nuclear power. The death toll was really low, roughly 2000, and many of those death were caused by the evacuation rather than radiation. The death toll of the tsunami/earthquake was 15000 according to wikipedia.

What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.

And all of this is with reactors that are really old. If we would put the same amount of engineering resources into nuclear as we put into chips I am sure the number of deaths would go down a few order of magnitudes.

[JohnBooty]

    I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes? 

Chernobyl has often been characterized as the result of a corrupt and incompetent late-stage USSR, whereas post-WWII Japan is seen as a generally well-run country.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with that, just trying to describe public opinion.

[avgcorrection]

You’re not countering the implicit argument that Germany won’t have a problem with earthquakes ruining their nuclear powerplants.

Germany is also a “well-run country” if you want to run with the old anti-Soviet argument.

[karamanolev]

FWIW, I'm a fan of nucear, but ... they don't have to counter that argument. It doesn't have to be earthquakes - it can be 1 of 100 problems. Japan knew they have to deal with earthquakes and didn't. What should make people more comfortable that Germany will be able to safeguard against their known risks?

[JohnBooty]

    What should make people more comfortable 
    that Germany will be able to safeguard 
    against their known risks?

The safety of nuclear power plants isn't exactly some great unknown.

There are ~450 plants currently operating in the world, with an average age of multiple decades. Plus all the ones that have been retired. That's a lot of data.

You don't really have to take anybody's word for it. They're safe.

They are not zero-risk, because literally nothing is. We also absolutely know the risks of fossil fuels (the planet is burning, and buyers potentially become dependent on hostile countries like Russia) and the current limitations of renewable energy sources.

So, to answer your questions: that is how you judge their potential safety in Germany or anywhere else.

[grecy]

The problem is when they go bad, it gets really bad.

We were extremely lucky with Chernobyl that young men sacrificed themselves, else a large chunk of Europe would be uninhabitable.

We were extremely lucky with Fukushima all the radiated water just went into the ocean. When it was going down there was nothing we could do but stand back and watch how bad it got.

Of course on a regular day nuclear is safe, but every now and then things go extremely badly, and sooner or later we’re not going to get so lucky. We will simply have to watch and retreat from death.

[Salgat]

The problem is that nuclear plants only need to fail once to have global catastrophic consequences. Chernobyl was so catastrophic that Gorbachev blamed the Soviet Union's collapse on it. Solar and other renewable energy sources can never even remotely approach this level of environmental risk.

[raxxorraxor]

Problem is that one plant critically failing is enough to devastate large portions of land, especially in tightly packed Europe. And the fault in Fukushima was due to economic reasons, the risk of backup generators being flooded was known. These are realities that you won't ever address fully because it would make energy generation too expensive.

A full life-cycle analysis of nuclear power isn't really favorable. Germany is a net power exporter. Sure, there is more to it since the energy isn't generated in correct place at the right time, the infrastructure has problems and then some.

But in the end nuclear isn't a solution here. Expensive, slow, another resource dependence and nobody knows yet how to get cheap uranium in the future. The developments previously are going in the correct direction and that direction did not include nuclear power in the meantime.

[avgcorrection]

1 of 100? Compared to the alternatives? Because that’s what matters here. Does nuclear have one-hundred times the problem?

Of course these obvious problems are not mentioned by name. Which makes one think that there are one-hundred unnamed ones beyond once the initial one-hundred would have been dealt with.

[metadat]

What are the remaining 95 potential uncontrollable problems beyond earthquake, fire, flood, war, human incompetence?

Given appropriate attention and care, these can be accounted for through planning processes and protocols.

[nosianu]

See France and its maintenance issues with not just one but many of their power plants, accumulated over decades and now greatly contributing to the European energy problems. (https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/13/frances-nuclear-...)

Some issues I see are accountants, management, laziness, "somebody else's problem", etc. Those are businesses and they will try all the well-known ways to save money. Which the politicians will also encourage, because nuclear power will need to be justified continuously (like all other forms).

There also are water issues, not just river temperature (France, this summer), we also had a lot of European rivers with barely enough or not enough for most of the normal uses of those rivers this summer - and predictions are we'll have more such extremes. So, ensuring water supplies will be adequate at all times will become harder too, and much more expensive.

Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear. (https://www.investigate-europe.eu/en/2022/russias-multi-mill...)

Air plane and human space flight accidents are extremely rare but they still occur despite all the rules and regulations and the training and the many levels of precautions, but nuclear has to be even better.

[karamanolev]

Just take a brief look at the list of nuclear accidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

There's various kinds of human errors (and humans will continue to make errors), equipment malfunctions, problems during equipment maintenance and so on.

Can you call "human incompetence" something to be planned for? Yes, sure, you have to plan for it. Can you plan it well enough so that it simply doesn't happen? Doesn't seem to have happened so far. Does it concern me too much? No. But do other people have to have the same risk tolerance? Also no. It's been proven that people are averse to rare-but-acute risks and can more easily accept frequent small risks (i.e. radiation and contamination from coal plants).

All that is to say that if people are concerned, it's on us to understand the reasons, not just shout into that void that "nuclear is SAFE!!!"

[DarknessFalls]

All is takes is sabotage of the nuclear plant, perhaps by those sympathetic to Russia and upset with Germany over their increased defense budget in response to the invasion of Ukraine.

[johannes1234321]

It's not fully an objective argument, butnan emotional. "Even Japan can't run them safely!" Where Japan is known for its precision and strict following of rules (perception!)

Yes, rationally the maths is a lot different, but countering emotions with facts is hard. (And then consider facts like long term deposition of nuclear waste etc.)

[avgcorrection]

> Where Japan is known for its precision and strict following of rules (perception!)

As compared to the Germans? Supposed rule-sticklers without earthquakes.

[fomine3]

So the lesson is that don't put together single impression for everything in a country (except communist country?). TEPCO (and some other nuclear corps in Japan) was known for hiding incidents, even prior the earthquake.

[epivosism]

There was 1 disputed radiation/nuclear related death from Fukushima.

And mention of 2200 related to the (post-tsunami) evacuation.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_ac...

[karamanolev]

That aside, what about price?

Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion.

I'm a fan of nuclear, but those are eye-watering numbers.

[pydry]

There is no valid argument against the eye watering price of nuclear power.

The arguments break down into:

* Pretending that solar/wind isnt 5x cheaper per unit.

* Pretending that only pricey batteries rather than cheap pumped storage can accomodate its variability.

* Pretending that there is a geographical shortage of potential pumped storage locations.

* Pretending that you'd need weeks of power storage to get to 99% carbon free rather than hours.

* Pretending that nuclear power does load following rather than relying upon gas to fill in its gaps like solar and wind.

* Pretending that nuclear power always produces 100% stable power. France manages an average of 72%. Denmark has a wind farm that manages 68%.

The only context in which nuclear power is cost effective is if you are keeping rickety old plants running longer than their scheduled lifetime, which isnt safe OR if the government is using it to subsidize nuclear arsenals/subs/etc.

[lm28469]

Seeing everything through the economical lens is exactly why we're still burnin coal and sucked Putin gas until a few months ago.

We're letting imaginary numbers dictate the future of humanity, "why did you let the world die, it was cheaper than fixing it" isn't a valid excuse}

And if you want to talk about number show much does it cost to the German healthcare system to take care of the hundred/thousands of people getting sick and dying because of coal pollution ?

[nickpp]

Anybody knows why they are completely cleaning up that plant instead of just cordoning it off and marking it as "deadly land, nobody allowed in". You know, an exclusion zone like Chernobyl.

Is land that expensive in Japan? Or is it some sort of ambition to prove they can repair that fuckup? O maybe there is a lot of money to be made in a cleanup operation?

[cedilla]

We're talking about highly toxic soil here. Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow. Just putting a bit of warning tape around it doesn't cut it.

This isn't a theoretical point, either, wild mushrooms are still unsafe to eat in some parts of central Europe, almost four decades after Tchernobyl.

The whole Fukushima disaster is another lesson in the prevention paradox. We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government and TEPCO expended to keep them that low.

[panick21_]

No its not actually highly toxic and not actually very dangerous at all. A false level of danger has been assigned to radiation and its risk, mostly because of bad science in the 1970s.

This mushrooms are still unsafe stuff is mostly a myth. What's correct is that these mushrooms still measure over the arbitrary level set government regulation during the height of panic about nuclear.

> We see low death and disease numbers, and somehow many people think that's because the disaster wasn't that bad after all, completely ignoring the literal tens of billions of dollars that the Japanese government

Actually much of those efforts have actually killed and hurt more people then it saved. Creating a panic and evacuating a major city because of some unfounded unscientific assessment of the danger.

I'm sure all the money spent on cleaning the grass has saved millions of people. The reality is that many of those efforts are political show making, security theater, like the TSA.

I'm sure there are some reasonable measures as well, but much of it is vastly overblown in terms of actual effects it would have.

See in Tschernobyl where very little was done, and people in the exclusion zone (where there is more radiation then in Japan) are totally fine.

[fomine3]

> Soil doesn't stay where it is, it moves with water and wind. You have to fix it, somehow.

If (enough) so, it is spread across the globe so it become negligible. Those lands are highly polluted so it can't be live.

[llsf]

The cost to dismantle a nuclear power plant is the same as for coal/gaz power plants. ~10% of the initial price. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

[karamanolev]

That's irrelevant to this particular discussion. I'm not talking about regular "dismantling a nuclear plant", but if 1/100 of the plants have 1000x the cleanup costs due to accidents, that changes the math. I pulled the above numbers out of my hat, they're probably wrong. I'm just adding a bit of nuance to the TCO calculation.

[efaref]

If we're talking TCO we need to calculate the TCO of coal and gas as including the cost of the destruction of the entire planet's climate.

[llsf]

I was just bring a data point about dismantling. Most reactors would be extended, in US we agreed to extend to 60 years, and already some are asking to push to 80 years. Since we update and replace lots of things every over time, we end up with "newer" plant over time. Pretty much everything is new beside the pool.

[mxscho]

> I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes?

I think the argument would be that the risk wasn't mitigated although it should've been known. There may be other known risks as well.

[metta2uall]

I think the point is that indeed Japan is known for earthquakes & tsunamis, and yet they still failed to do the work of making their reactors tsunami-proof. Thus people think that if Japan, with a reputation valuing "high quality", takes such brazen shortcuts, can their own government be trusted to responsibly operate nuclear power? It's quite tragic since nuclear is a great technology in many cases, especially where there is high density populations but not much land for renewables.

Re. the low death toll, perhaps it's quite low because people were forced to evacuate. Evacuation and the marking of land as contaminated by radioactivity is considered a very high price to pay.

[atoav]

> Evacuation and the marking of land as contaminated by radioactivity is considered a very high price to pay.

Especially in dense Europe. In the US there is more space for surch things to happen and have it only affect a stretch of uninhabitated wildland.

[fweimer]

There's moderate seismic activity in the South-Western part of Germany, higher once you get closer to Basel (which was destroyed by an earthquake in the 14th century). Curiously, the French Fessenheim nuclear power plant is in this area as well.

[laurencerowe]

> If we would put the same amount of engineering resources into nuclear as we put into chips I am sure the number of deaths would go down a few order of magnitudes.

Nuclear reactors probably have more in common with the fabs where chips are made. Both are enormously complex engineering challenges where each plant costs tens of billions of dollars and gets more expensive with each new generation of technology.

Whereas solar panels have followed the path of silicon chips and gotten cheaper as they are produced in ever greater numbers, to the point where the panels themselves make up less than half the build cost for utility scale solar.

[LatteLazy]

Most nuclear accidents are caused by greed, laziness and shortsightedness. Japan seems to be one of the few societies (possibly the only wealthy one) that doesn't suffer too badly from these issues. When I worry about nuclear power here in the UK, I don't worry about earthquakes, I worry to PMs cousin will get a billion pounds to build a containment unit and not do it. Or the reactor will need to be shut down but the CEO will decide to keep it running because safety and maintenance are just "cost centres"...

[solarkraft]

> isn't Japan known for its earthquakes?

Japan is known for being technologically advanced and safe, so the earthquake shouldn't have mattered.

> What should really put this into perspective is that air pollutions is estimated to kill millions every year.

This is certainly a great point, one I tend to find convincing, but it seems very hard to convince others on similar grounds: Radiation is just way more immediately scary.

[baxtr]

I don’t want to argue your positions but you gotta realize that this argument you’re making is fact based one. OP is talking about triggered emotions which are much more complex to dissect and understand.

[llsf]

Only one death related to radiation. All the 2,000 deaths mentioned are "disaster-related deaths" (evacuation, stress, etc.). source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...

[wlll]

> In my opinion Fukushima should be an argument _for_ nuclear power. The death toll was really low, roughly 2000, and many of those death were caused by the evacuation rather than radiation. The death toll of the tsunami/earthquake was 15000 according to wikipedia.

Isn't the pacific now significantly polluted by radiation from the plant? That seems like a pretty bad outcome, even if the direct number of deaths was relatively low.

[ohgodplsno]

The pacific's radiation levels have increased by about 0%. The total releases from all of Fukushima was on the order of 30 PBq. Water has a natural radioactivity of 13 Bq/L. So, if you want to only double the natural radioactivity of water (which is still basically nothing), you need to dilute ask this radiation in 2e15 L of water.

The entire pacific is 7.10e20 L of water. Even the area around Japan is thousands of times more liters of water. To give you an idea, in 2011, 41% of caught marine species on the coast of Fukushima had Cs137 concentrations higher than the normal limits (100bq/kg, which is still really damn low). In 2015, that was 0.05%

So, no, the pacific doesn't give a damn about Fukushima. And so do the people. You're exposed to about 2100Bq in a year.

[jcranmer]

It's worth noting that oceanic water is actually very poorly mixed, with only the first 200m or so mixing well with the atmosphere, so the radioactive emissions likely wouldn't increase in the deep ocean water. On the other hand, that basically only lops a zero off your number.

[stjohnswarts]

Has there been a spike in mutations in sea life? Humans? I have my doubts. The amount of radation dumped from fukushima is literally a drop in the ocean.

[naasking]

Burning coal releases more airborne radioactive waste in a short time than a nuclear plant does over its whole lifetime.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...

[felixfbecker]

A nuclear plant that doesn't explode, that is. Pretty sure Tschernobyl released more radiation than a coal plant over its lifetime. Probably more than all coal plants in Germany in their lifetime combined.

[thescriptkiddie]

I was going to reply that that has only happened literally twice ever, but decided to fact check that first. Apparently small steam and hydrogen explosions happened a whole lot at nuclear reactors in the 1950s and 60s.

[naniwaduni]

Pretty sure the nuclear still comes ahead after averaging those out with all the nuclear plants that have gotten quietly decommissioned with no explosions, though?

[raxxorraxor]

There aren't many nuclear plants that are fully decommissioned. Perhaps around 10 and that still includes management of the waste.

[fartsucker69]

if you really weigh against all coal plants in germany, the numbers are not far off

and radioactive material is like a fraction of the problem with coal. they have much worse health impact in other areas. they're linked (directly or indirectly) to 10000s of thousands of deaths a year.

[naasking]

And new reactor designs are meltdown proof, so what's the problem exactly?

[andirk]

Can you cite your claim? Meltdown-proof? So a huge earthquake and tsunami won't cause nuclear waste leaks in the slightest? Nothing will?

[naasking]

I'll give an example of molten salt reactors [1]; other designs have different but comparable safety properties. The nuclear fuel is suspended in a molten salt. If the reactor is breached, you'll have what's effectively a contained chemical spill that has a very limited spread. Current water reactors trigger a steam explosion that spews out radiation into the atmosphere, which is why it's so catastrophic.

If you get a runaway reaction, it has a fail-safe described in the article that drains the reactor into containment vessels underground.

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/04/166330/meltdown-...

[ohgodplsno]

Gen III+ reactors are pretty fucking close to meltdown proof.

Any reactor in use today will have a negative void coefficient. Which means, if you don't put power into it, the reaction naturally stops. Then you've got control rods and neutron moderators that will fall back upon the core if there's no power. Then Gen3+ includes a core catcher in which, should it breach its reactor, it just falls in there and cools down.

[cedilla]

All five large reactor disasters occurred with reactors that also had fail-safes that rendered them theoretically safe. In the case of Three-Mile-Island, unlucky technicians had to work very hard against the reactor's system to sustain the failure.

[kzrdude]

Meltdown is a specific type of catastrophe (overheat and fuel rods literally melting). So being proof says nothing about other kinds of leaks.

[jhrmnn]

I think the fear of black swans, that is, unknown risks. I think most people don’t understand that the experts can really rule out something like a meltdown in modern reactors

[legulere]

Let's say a metric ton of coal has around 1 kBq and around 10000 PBq were released at Chernobyl.

That would mean around 10 quadrillion tons of coal would need to get burned to emit the same amount of radiation. China is currently burning 4 trillion tons of coal per year, which is a 2500th part of it.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20005612/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Release_and...

[WithinReason]

Only caesium-137 is long lived, of which 85 PBq was released

[worldvoyageur]

When Chernobyl happened I was a physics undergrad in Kingston, Ontario, Canada and was spending the summer term on campus. We (the grad students really) went up to the roof of the physics building and started measuring for the radiation. There was much rejoicing when it turned up, which as I imperfectly remember was about two weeks after the incident.

Which is to say, that the radiation could be measured is different from saying that the radiation represented a significant health risk.

[this_user]

Not all of us have the luxury of having more than 7000 km between us and the next nuclear accident, though. But I can send you some mushrooms from the forests of southern Germany if you would like to explore the health risks further.

[BitwiseFool]

>"But I can send you some mushrooms from the forests of southern Germany if you would like to explore the health risks further."

Sounds like the GP would receive mushrooms that have elevated levels of radionuclides that are within the legal limit of what is considered safe to consume.

"Around 95% of wild mushroom samples collected in Germany in the last six years still showed radioactive contamination from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, albeit not above legal limits, the German food safety regulator said on Friday."

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/three-decades-g...

[JoeAltmaier]

It's tree moss that is the larger risk apparently. It 'breathes' particles and keeps them. Wild boar love it; you shoot a wild boar, you have to get it tested with a Geiger counter to make sure it's safe. Like mercury in salmon, boar are a concentrator for fallout!

[ta123456789]

Seems like it would be completely fine to eat, even regularly. With mushrooms having 1000 Bq/kg at worst, according to samples by BfS.

> The consumption of 200 grams of mushrooms with 2,000 becquerel caesium-137 per kilogram results in an exposure of 0.005 millisievert. This is considerably less than the radiation exposure during a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. However, if adults eat such a mushroom meal each week, they will receive an additional annual radiation exposure corresponding to about twenty flights from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria. Expressed in numbers it is 0.27 millisievert.

https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

[plextoria]

This is the best explanation I’ve heard so far about Germany’s position on nuclear. It is based much more on emotions than on rational arguments.

[dorgo]

Not that there is a lack of rational arguments against nuclear... But climate change may overrule them all.

[pydry]

Or would, if solar and wind werent 5x cheaper per unit of power and 2x cheaper when combined with pumped storage.

[raxxorraxor]

Part of it is emotional, but so is the argument for it. It is simply too expensive compared to other forms of energy generation. And yes, you still have the waste.

[yodelshady]

The forests near mine and just about everywhere else on the entire planet have elevated levels of BEING ON GODDAMNED FIRE thanks to coal-burners.

No there's not history. There's not emotions. There's god-damned stupidity and a refusal to evaluate risk at the top level of government, that has condemned hundred of millions.

I've lived near irradiated areas too. There was zero justification for this.

[cypress66]

I'm sure your science teacher can also measure air pollution in his garden.

[ben_w]

That's not a way to make people comfortable with radiation, it's a way to make people uncomfortable with air pollution.

[drekipus]

Good. People should be uncomfortable with air pollution.

[nimbius]

>If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can

While I agree the German position is more complex, the conclusion is reducto ad absurdum given the Fukushima reactor meltdown is an extraordinarily complex issue without a single definitive root cause which could be attributed to simple human control.

Any human control is predicated and annotated by known assumptions and performance envelopes. Failure modes can be predicted, past performance can be analyzed and conclusions can be drawn using scientific knowledge and evidence for the basis of ones systems of control, be they industrial or environmental. Failure events or conditions, although regretful, are very important as they permit us to learn, to adapt, to grow and to change in response to events and conditions as they change or evolve over time.

Because Japan is a brave, science minded nation, it hasnt eschewed the atom even in the face of this egregious misfortune. The initial German response to the accident could best be compared to that of a child: reactionary, undisciplined, haphazard and deleterious. Im glad to learn more sensible minds have prevailed and reconsidered nuclear power as a sustainable partner, albeit somewhat irked to see its only real commitment in this case is the overwhelming demand for energy independence amidst global conflict.

[cedilla]

...you do understand that your "sensible" minds only decided to keep three reactors online for six months, right?

It seems like argument you have is that the "sensible" minds are agreeing with you, and a whole litany of name-calling for the people who advocated abandoning nuclear - who are largely the exact same people by the way.

[credit_guy]

> Fukushima gave the debate another spin „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“.

That's an understandable reaction.

But a better reaction would have been "what lessons did we learn?".

After the 2008 financial crisis, the financial regulators around the world gathered at the 2009 Pittsburgh Summit [1] to see what can be done to improve the resiliency of the global financial markets. They came up with a Statement [2]. Later on, the Basel Committee ironed out some details, and the national regulators other details, and the outcome was a long string of financial reforms known collectively as Basel III.

This was a monumental achievement (well, it's still work in progress, but it's about 80-90% done). Of course, for many professionals in the financial markets it felt more like a curse than a blessing. But we have been trough the March 2020 financial panic, and the financial system coped quite well.

In the nuclear regulatory space, there are so many regulators around the world. The NRC for sure, but also the nuclear regulators in Canada, the UK, France and Finland. One can add South Korea to the list and probably a few more countries. I'm sure they are exchanging notes. Overall, I think they have probably a huge amount of experience, and they have met 99.999% of the edge cases for classical (pressurized and boiling water) reactors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_G20_Pittsburgh_summit

[2] http://www.g20.utoronto.ca/2009/2009communique0925.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel_III

[hn_go_brrrrr]

"What lessons did we learn?" is an excellent question, but it's the reaction of a seasoned professional. The reason we have to teach that outlook to new grads is people don't think that way by default. It's unrealistic to expect that reaction from the general populace.

[jimlongton]

> „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“

Nuclear technology is risky but Fukushima isn't a good reflection of what modern nuclear power plants can accomplish. The reactors at Fukushima were designed half a century ago and were known to be flawed 35 years before the accident happened [1]. It's ironic that the plant was running longer than was originally planned in part because of Green opposition to newer power plants.

[1] https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/03/16/fukushima-reactor-flaws...

[raxxorraxor]

> was measurable in Germany

It still is measurable. Only 5% of the reactor mass managed to escape into the environment. There are effective safety mechanisms but like in Fukushima they are subject to economic realities. The luck here was that water is a very good radiation absorber. It will still go into the food chain and increase risks. Perhaps not by much if we are lucky.

This is politics and letting them run is populism in my opinion. They won't run longer than to their next security inspection. Even the owners were reluctant because you have to reorganize the demolition, which isn't trivial for NPP.

Nuclear can be a source of energy, but the way it is currently hailed as a solution for climate change should only really convince filthy peasants. Emotional is as much a reluctance to consider better options because it is expensive and there are a lot of unsolved problems. Beginning from mining Uranium to getting rid of the waste permanently.

[tuatoru]

Can you quantify "elevated"?

How does it compare to living in Denver, Colorado, vs living in Frankfurt? (Denver is at a higher altitude and also in a region of slightly radioactive rocks.)

How does it compare to the effects of 30,000 km of flying?

[peaslock]

It is measurable, but not harmful to a meaningful extent. There are lots of sources of low-dose radiation in the natural human/primate/.../mammalian environment.

[godelski]

For what it is worth, I did an estimate on here awhile ago (welcome to search my history) where IIRC you had to eat several kilos of boar and mushrooms every day to approach limits for radiation workers (which has a large safety margin).

I think many people forget that we are really good at detecting radiation. This is mostly due to Cold War era fear and so a lot of research got put into this and we have cheap and sensitive devices. Cheap enough that there are large public networks of radiation monitoring set up by citizens. Not too dissimilar from citizen weather projects.

[lm28469]

> Up to today boar and mushrooms have an elevated level of radiation in the forests around my home.

Their coal power plants made you breath more radioactive particles than Chernobyl

[thisarticle]

Wait until you see how much damage coal does to your body.

[panick21_]

> While I agree that it would have been sensible to phase out coal and then nuclear

How about not phasing it out at all.

> The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden

Yeah you can also measure the output form coal plants.

Tschernobyl killed either literally or basically nobody in German, and hardly hurt anybody.

It was basically nonsense, because of political reasons rules were adopted based on totally fraudulent science and then these rules were used in endless scare mongering campaigns and misinformation campaigns.

But at some point you have to stop with pure emotional responses and endless fear-mongering and actually look at things rationally.

[pelasaco]

unnecessary german angst. Just check the map https://www.wano.info/members/wano-world-map. We are surrounded by atomic power plants. Switzerland, France, Belgium, Denmark, Czech republic..almost all of them are situated in the german borders.

[andreasha]

Denmark doesn't have any and five of eight reactors on that map of south of Sweden has closed, some soon almost two decades ago.

[mk89]

Indeed, I just looked it up: https://www.euronuclear.org/glossary/nuclear-power-plants-in...

For God's sake, France has 56 power plants. What are we talking about....

[mousetree]

What do you mean they are situated in Germany borders? You mean other countries operate their nuclear plants within Germany? I clicked on a few that were marked Paris in that map (Neckarwestheim, Philippsburg, Gundremmingen) and they all very much seem to be German owned and operated. What am I missing? Would be very suprised to hear otherwise.

[andreasha]

Well after Unipers bailout by Germany (99% ownership) and Unipers majority ownership of one nuclear power plant in Sweden (minority in the other two).

[fartsucker69]

aren't people here supposed to be educated?

there have been many studies on this. tschernobyl has had no measurable impact on any health related metrics you could come up with in countries outside the ukraine. even directly at tschernobyl the long lasting impact was minimal and most related deaths were an effect of accute exposure.

[stjohnswarts]

lots of things are measurable, but did cancer and other radiation related diseases spike in Germany or not?

[heisig]

Emotions certainly played a major role when Germany decided to phase out nuclear in 2011, and the execution and timeline of that phase-out were poor.

But that doesn't mean Germans haven't pondered seriously about this topic in the meantime. And the result is that, apart from this band-aid solution for the current winter, Germany will still phase out nuclear. Let me try to summarize the most important points I know of:

- Cost. Nuclear energy is expensive energy. It just happened to be cheaper than solar and wind energy a decade ago. But the cost of renewables went down spectacularly, and the cost of nuclear went up at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity). So why invest in nuclear energy when we could have more low-carbon energy for the same price elsewhere?

- Subsidies. So far, all nuclear power plants have been heavily subsidized. There isn't a single country where the full cost of decommissioning and permanent storage of radioactive material is properly taken into account. And there is no power plant with a full insurance, so those risks are carried by the public. Once we eliminate these subsidies, the cost of nuclear grows even further.

- Reliability. Some people dislike renewables because there are times with no wind and no sunshine. But they forget that wind and sunshine are relatively predictable and have worst-case bounds. So investing into storage and the electricity grid makes renewables highly reliable. Now look at nuclear. The worst case scenario is roughly what just happened in France: you discover a problem that affects an entire generation of power plants, and all of them have to be taken offline until the problem is resolved (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Crisis...). Without its European neighbors, France would be in deep trouble. If we take precautions against this risk, the cost of nuclear grows even further.

- Inflexibility. Nuclear power plants need a high uptime to amortize their construction cost. But once they operate in a grid with a substantial amount of renewables, they are displaced more and more and the cost per unit of energy grows even further.

- War. The Russian army has recently captured a Ukrainian nuclear power plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_at_the_Zaporizhzhia_Nuc...). The plant is now used to store military equipment, the employees are bullied or even tortured, and all pillars of nuclear safety are being violated. There are credible approaches how we can build a power plant that resists human stupidity or a natural disaster, but there is no way we can build a power plant that is unconditionally safe in a war zone.

- Nuclear Proliferation. Once the know-how and the infrastructure for handling fissionable material is in place, even if only for civilian purposes, there is a much stronger incentive to also look into military use. And the last thing our planet needs is more nuclear weapons.

Given these points, the current German position seems quite sensible and I wonder why some other nations are suddenly so eager to build new nuclear power plants.