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by ovi256 623 days ago
Not at all, the chemical industry also can do this.

Worse, we store untreatable chemical waste forever (see Germany's many chemical waste dumps), unlike nuclear waste which will eventually become safe.

1 comments

Please source.
I cannot read German, Google Translated it, and could have misunderstood but could not find how those waste sites may trigger such major accident, nor about untreatable waste and one of them stores nuclear waste ("from the Greifswald nuclear power plant")!

Chemical industry also produces very dangerous waste (Seveso...), I agree. This cannot serve as an excuse for nuclear, especially as, nowadays, we know how to industrially obtain electricity from renewable sources (no major accident similar to a nuclear's one, nor such dangerous waste).

Sorry.

Unfortunately the two sites have no english entries in Wikipedia, I just put them there because they are the two largest, but still mostly unknown to the general population.

With the exception of the locals, who fear for them leaking into their groundwaters. Which may be unfounded for Herfa-Neurode because that is sitting in a real stable formation, for now...

...which says nothing about larger timescales, which we are dealing with here, because much of the stuff stored there has no 'half-life', and is way nastier than anything which caused Seveso.

The other site, Ihlenberg, formerly called "Schönberg" ('nice Mountain', get it?) has a more interesting history. It's located right next to the former border between West-Germany and East-Germany, seperating them from the end of WW2 until reunification.

In those times they buried much western trash for money in rather 'hush-hush' and corrupt ways there. The nastiest ones. They were poor and needed the money. What exactly, and how much, at which position und which conditions is still unknown, and not easy to assess, because that probing would disturb the other nasty stuff which it is embedded in.

The fear there is much more founded, because it happend in rather uncoordinated ways, because of the 'hush-hushness' due to corruption, and that site is not stable. If it leaks, it has the potential to poison the whole Bay of Lübeck.

It also sits on something like a geologic fault line roughly spanning from Kiel in the Northwest to there, caused by glacial rebound of Scandinavia. Slowly and gentle for now, but one never knows, right?

That was that. As to an excuse for nuclear...

Do you really think all that oh so sustainable green shit is growing on trees? Maybe look into so called 'superfund sites' in the USA, and how they overlap with semiconductor production sites, which also applies to solar cells. Japan should have had some of those 'oopsies', too. But probably not spoken about, because the nail that is standing out has to be hammered in, right?

Wind? How long do they last? What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?

Their disposal after use?

The large fundaments they need in the form of concrete, and the OH MY GAWD ALL THAT NASTY CARBON!1!! that is causing? Not to speak of the disturbance of ground water tables, when they have to go 15 to 40 meters (or even more) deep for stability.

Geothermals? You have much of that. Why is it used so rarely?

Sayonara.

Thank you for those details. This is even worse than I understood.

As already stated by Kon5ole: we get the benefits and future generations gets the burden.

Nuclear (decommission, hot waste...) plays the same game.

> Do you really think all that oh so sustainable green shit is growing on trees?

No, but AFAIK we know ways (some are expensive) to alleviate part of their burden and the net result cannot be matched by other type of sources.

> Wind? How long do they last?

It depends. https://www.tvindkraft.dk/stories/a-new-nacelle-back-end/

> What's with the abrasion of the (mostly the front edges) blades while they operate and the entry of those stuff in form of microplastics into the environment?

Nothing is perfect. Nowadays a coating is used ( https://weatherguardwind.com/leading-edge-erosion/ ).

> Their disposal after use?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41783908

> Geothermals? You have much of that. Why is it used so rarely?

Because in some places it can trigger earthquakes. Renewables is a set of solutions, none is perfect (one-size-fits-all). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy