[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.

[panick21_]

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

Not really. If you actually measure it, its not actually that bad.

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

Often claimed but, the scientific bases for this claim is beyond shake. Maybe at the very worse you could say that radiation that was slightly dangerous would have been measurable all over Europe, but even that is a stretch.

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

Fukushima killed people because of rush unnecessary evacuations. Nobody actually died of radiation, maybe a very small group of people will have a slightly higher likely-hood of getting cancer, but even that will most likely not even be measruable.

The actual earth quake and the water killed far more people. The nuclear event made the news because its a novelty, while we have seen many people killed by earthquake and water.

> sooner or later we’re not going to get so lucky.

Given that safety increases over time, even the chance of a minor incident is increasingly less likely.

And if we actually built modern plants not 1970 design we could make it almost impossible for any significant risk to exist at all. But of course research and progress has essentially been stopped.

[pyuser583]

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

Deepwater horizon was really bad. Plenty of coal accidents are real bad.

Not having energy is really bad.

Nuclear is the safest form of energy - and catastrophic failures are found in other forms of energy production.

[shrimpx]

The BP oil spill was immeasurably more disastrous than Fukushima. Oil is dangerous to drill and refine and it pollutes like crazy when converted to energy.

[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.

[throw0101c]

> The problem is that nuclear plants only need to fail once to have global catastrophic consequences.

As opposed to many other reliable generation types which have global catastrophic consequences† while running normally.

And by "reliable" I mean can consistently provide power more that 50% of the time:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor#Capacity_facto...

† E.g., climate change.

[PM_me_your_math]

Solar and wind can never even approach a fraction of the baseline power requirements either.

Of course, it takes a significant amount diesel fuel, energy, and mining to make EV related equipment, too.

[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.

[panick21_]

And France having maintenance issues is in large part because of the anti-nuclear campaign that increasingly started to attempt to move away from nuclear. For a while even in France they basically just wanted to run the reactors out and switch to renewables.

So the politics goes like this, cause maintenance delay, condemn nuclear for maintenance delay. Seriously, these delays are being handled in a reasonable time-frames and most of the reactors will be back when they are really needed.

Consider that with the age of these reactors, wind-farms would have to be mostly rebuilt to a larger degree.

Also, if we actually made progress on technology then we could have had moved on to air-cooled designs but sadly we can't have nice things.

[belorn]

> Not to mention that Russia - Rosatom - will again play a big role in Western European energy when it comes to nuclear.

Good thing that 1), nuclear fuel storage in europe tend to have almost decade long stockpiles, 2), there are plenty of alternative to Rosatom to buy nuclear fuel from, 3), nuclear fuel is fairly easy to import compared to massive amount of natural gas.

Sweden is only a stone throw away and they have nuclear fuel production that they sell as exports. They also acquired the design and patents to produce nuclear fuel that fit power plants from Rosatom. Those 20% of fuel that Russia sell is a solvable problem, but as with anything it would cost money, investments and a bit of time to ramp up production.

[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!!!"

[metadat]

A good reactor design would account for the human factor, and perhaps this is the truly difficult problem with practical nuclear power.

[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.

[hadlock]

I can read all the science about how nuclear material in the soil is safe, but also I can't in good conscience let my toddler roll around in it and put it in her mouth. You need 100% buy in from parents who will be raising their children there.

Japan has removed the top ~8 inches of topsoil from the affected areas around fukashima, I think that is really impressive, but even then I would never allow my family to move there for any reason.

That said, I'm generally in favor of nuclear. I just don't want my kid rolling around in contaminated soil.

[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.

[pydry]

Yes, we do. And, a proper TCO for all forms of energy would result in us only building solar, wind and pumped storage, however.

[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.