| > Der Energiewende Off topic: I'm always a bit mystified as to why people try to use German articles in English texts when they obviously don't know the gender of the word. "Wende" (turn) is female and you thus use "die" as an article. The third possible article is "das" and used for neutral nouns like "Auto". Given it is easy to look up [1], I guess you didn't know there are several? On topic: I won't state my opinion about the short term cost efficiency of nuclear power, because I don't have the references or raw data at hand to back it up (I wish a lot of others in this thread in the same situation wouldn't either). But IMHO the strongest argument against nuclear power is the uncertainty of long term waste disposal, given that we (currently) can't realistically predict storage conditions on a geological time frame. A month ago there was an article on HN about how we fail to come up with a way to communicate the danger of long term storage to future generations in a reliable way [2]. Even from an economic point of view the danger of a cost explosion of the nuclear waste disposal purely because of political struggles is daunting. In Germany we have a small disposal facility, the Asse, build to test long term storage in salt mines. Because of the usual combination of human error, incompetence and cover ups, waste was dumped there even while it was slowly becoming unstable [3]. Getting it all back out will cost somewhere around 5 billion euros. Guess who's paying for it. [1] https://www.google.de/search?q=dictionary+energiewende [2] http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/ten-thousand-years/ , corresponding hacker news thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090759 [3] I'm oversimplifying. See http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-weighs-o... for more background and http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/07/photogalleri... for pictures. |
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/01/sellafiel...