[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.

[atoav]

Oh sure. The wave of deformed children that I grew up with in the shouthern German, southern Austrian area surely had nothing to do with this, pure coincidence. There are certain mushrooms that are still forbidden to eat.

It is easy to talk for someone who has not experienced the fallout of an nuclear powerplant burning a few countries over. Experiencing such a thing (hopefully understandably) changes how favourable people see the technology.

On top of that the question of safe nuclear waste storage is far from solved in dense Europe. From an ethical standpoint I think an approach of "Lol we need energy now, let's have later generations deal with this and pay for it" highly questionable.

If you produce one kW/h of nuclear energy today, my opinion is that the costs of the potential fallout in the weird rare cataatrophe scenario and the waste storage for the whole lifetime of the waste need to be paid ahead. That, however would make nuclear uneconmical.

[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.

[grecy]

The difference is even when coal or oil goes “worst case scenario” bad, it’s still entirely manageable.

We have tools, equipment and people to put out oil rig fires, clean up oil spills and all that.

Obviously Exxon Valdez was very, very bad. So was deep water horizon. Now imagine they were nuclear plantS that went bad and we didn’t get lucky like in the past. It would be many orders of magnitudes worse, for tens of thousands of years.

[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.

[Schroedingersat]

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

Compare it dollar for dollar.

You can get a lot of curtailment, oversupply, and storage for $12/W

Also if you look at France, nuclear's not doing so hot on the availability front.

[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.

[karamanolev]

Agreed. "A good reactor design" to that definition is enormously hard though - I'll be incredibly happy if that gets solved, hopefully with a modular "built in a factory" design that can be easily replicated and remain very 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.