| ▲ | kleiba 14 hours ago |
| And interesting, this is in stark contract to France's biggest neighbor: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-shuts-down-its-last-nuclear-po... However, the opposition to nuclear is currently being reevaluated by the German government. |
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| ▲ | huhkerrf 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I still get annoyed when I think of this tweet by French Green party Senator Melanie Vogel after Germany shut down its last reactor: https://x.com/Melanie_Vogel_/status/1647352302171308036 > Sex is good but have you tried having your country shutting down its last nuclear power plants in 30 mn? It's so absolutely horribly short sighted. |
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| ▲ | Iridescent_ 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We have the ecologists we deserve... and boy do we not deserve anything nice...
Afaik this is one of the least terrible of them we have... | | | |
| ▲ | blueflow 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There is no reasonably safe solution for storing the active waste. Continuing with nuclear power will increase the size of the problem. | | |
| ▲ | ninalanyon 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | A partial solution is to build reactors that can use that waste. Thorium reactors can do that and have the advantage that you can't make a bomb from it and that it is easier to control. | |
| ▲ | achierius 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What do you mean by that? Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well, and the 'size' of the problem is so small that even if we were to 100x it it would still be minuscule when compared to e.g. coal ash runoff, which includes fun things like arsenic and mercury and is currently 'disposed' of by stuffing it in landfills or even uncovered open-air pools. | | |
| ▲ | blueflow 6 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Deep geological storage seems to work pretty well Not well enough - the crystalline parts of earth's crust are still too porous to reliably keep it contained. It would leak like radon gas. The radon gas situation exists because the earth's crust is unable contain the earths residue radioactivity. | |
| ▲ | stefantalpalaru 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | throwayay5837 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Storing all of the highly active radioactive waste that France produced over a year takes about 47 40-foot shipping containers. Small feeder shops can contain a few hundred containers. Actual container shops contain thousands. 47 does not seem like much? | | |
| ▲ | cycomanic 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | And what about the mid to low radioactive waste? Also let's not forget France does not have any long term storage facility for their highly radioactive waste yet. Why if it is so easy have they not managed? |
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| ▲ | southernplaces7 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're saying a flatly mistaken thing in absolutist terms from pure fucking igonrance, as if you knew what you were talking about, at that. There are many ways to store nuclear waste very safely, just as there are many ways to store all kinds of dangerous things safely and do all kinds of dangerous things we need to do as a civilization, safely. As for the size of the "problem" growing. Go look at how much space even all the world's known HL nuclear waste combined requires, and how slowly that space (hint: it's tiny, as in, fits-into-a-college-sports-auditorium with room to spare for a quick basketball game tiny) grows year over year, or would grow even if we exponentially increased our use of nuclear. People such as yourself, just blandly stating plain nonsense with certainty are cause for many problems in the world, and for nuclear energy, they're as common as fruit flies, buzzing around any serious debate. | | |
| ▲ | kleiba 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just to give a little context: in Germany, which the OP was about, just the search for a suitable place to store nuclear waste started in 1999 with the formation of a working group of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Climate Action, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety [1]. It is expected that the result of the search process will not be available until the year 2046 [2]. Maybe it's not quite as easy as the layman thinks, especially considering that Germany has a lot less space then, say, the US. -- [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150217045132/http://www.bfs.de... [2] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/endlager-atommuell-1.569... | | |
| ▲ | blueflow 2 minutes ago | parent [-] | | ... and this research is done by people like my partner, who is currently writing their thesis about that. I could cite their previous publications here but that would dox me. |
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| ▲ | ohdeargodno 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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| ▲ | cladopa 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| France biggest neighbour is Spain... |
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| ▲ | Archelaos 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| One of the best things Germany ever did. We already have produced enough poison for a million years. Renewables and perhaps nuclear fusion is the future. |
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| ▲ | ninja3925 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Can you expand? What is “poison” referring to? Surely, burning coal as Germany’s current pace can’t be seen as a success, can it? | | |
| ▲ | Archelaos 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Radiation poisoning. Fossil fuels fall into the same category. The alternative is not nuclear vs. fossil. We should focus entirely on renewable energies. Of course Germany is now in a transition period, and there are a lot of conservative politicians who have been shying away from the high investments required for a fast transition. I think the main problem here is that the fossil-nuclear advocates shift the main problems to future generations (climate change, long-term storage of nuclear waste), the general public (large subsidies, minimal security standards, no or unsufficient insurance of power plants against desasters) or other countries (placing nuclear plants or waste deposits at the border, relaying on other countries for long term storing of nuclear waste). Together with extremely optimistic estimates, this makes their energy costs appear low on paper, when in reality the overall costs are immense. In contrast, there do not appear to be many cost elements of renewable energy installations that can be concealed or embellished. The reserve funds for their demolition are perhaps the only exception. But these only account for a small part of the costs at any rate. |
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| ▲ | southernplaces7 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And nuclear could have drastically reduced that production of "poison" by the way. Arguments about how much we've contaminated with X are sort of immaterial to arguments in favor of a different thing with its own much more specific (and useful) dynamics. It's a bit absurd, what you say, like arguing that it's good to stop using a stove in your apartment and just eat food raw, because one of your neighbors already did enough bad because they burned their entire house down while trying to make a bonfire with piles of coal in their yard. | | |
| ▲ | Archelaos 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | I am not saying that. I am saying that you should use renewable energy to operate your (energy efficient) stove. The technology is here. | | |
| ▲ | celsoazevedo 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | Using renewables makes a lot of sense, but the sun doesn't shine all the time, you can't control the wind or the rain, and batteries don't have unlimited capacity. You still need something that starts producing electricity at a flip of a switch. Fusion might do that in the future, but until then, you'll be burning coal or something like gas (which you don't have locally) because the alternative isn't perfect? |
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| ▲ | stefantalpalaru 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [dead] | |
| ▲ | ohdeargodno 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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