World News

FFS, people are stupid.

There was a huge hysteria about nuclear when Fukushima happened. A clear majority was for immediate action. Merkel's coalition government would have ended if she hadn't done a 180 on nuclear and decided to shut down nuclear as soon as possible, which was 2023. I was against shutting it down back then but I thought you can't go against the whole population, so I get why they did it. People didn't change their mind until 2022. Nobody talked about reversing that decision in all these years when there was actually time to reverse the decision.

Now, that the last reactor is shut down, the same people that were up in arms in 2011 are now up in arms that we don't have nuclear. Building new plants will cost billions and take decades and nuclear doesn't work well with renewables because of its inflexibility. It makes no sense at all. It was a long-term decision we can't just back away from. What's done is done.

Killing nuclear energy in Germany was the greatest success of FSB up to the point of planting an asset right in the middle of the Oval Office.

I'll just comment about one thing that keeps popping up in the discussions: grid-level storage. There is no such thing yet really that would last a full day cycle, and the 100MW or so units we are building are mostly for frequency stabilization and for buying enough time to turn on a base-load plant when the renewables drop out. I'm not arguing against storage - it is absolutely needed.

The problem is the scale, which people don't seem to get. Largest amount of energy we can currently repeatedly store and release is with pumped hydro, and the locations where this is possible are few and far between. Once the batteries reach this level-of-capacity, then we have a possibility to use them as grid-level storage that lasts a few days instead of hours.

just not true.innofact can f off. if you keep asking the old people, you will get old people answers.

when confronting the asked ppl with the numbers it costs to build a new one they all dont want a new one. not to mention the insurance for a plant. and from ukraine war we all learned nuclear ia stupid.

or go ask any of those fuckwits if we can store the waste where they live. numbers prove that around the plants the number of kids with cancer did indeed exceed all expections.

NOBODY wants a plant or the waste anywhere close to where they live.

"would you like cheap clean nucular(!) energy"

or

"would you like a powerplant and final storage near you"?

fuck innofacts hate campaign.

Southern countries (Spain and Portugal) have a lot of wind and hydro (and soon solar) power to spare. But somehow some "actors" are cutting them off from the rest of the European power grid. Looking at you France, your greedy bastards!

There's nothing more to come. Nuclear power is slow and uneconomical.

Joe Kaeser, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Siemens Energy: "There isn't a single nuclear power plant in the world that makes economic sense," he said on the ARD program Maischberger on November 27, 2024.

https://www.tagesschau.de/faktenfinder/farbebekennen-weidel-faktencheck-100.html?at_medium=mastodon

A fact check by the Fraunhofer Institute on nuclear energy states: "For example, around €2.5 billion would have to be raised to cover the nuclear waste generated. Overall, considerable short-term investments would be required." (for the construction of a new power plant)

https://www.ikts.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ikts/abteilungen/umwelt_und_verfahrenstechnik/technologieoekonomik_nachhaltigkeitsanalyse/oekonomische_analyse_nachhaltigkeit/241030_Fraunhofer-Faktencheck_Kernenergie.pdf

Germany shot itself in the foot when it turned away from nuclear...

Due to an absolutely comical amount of disinformation on the topic. People are absolutely clueless about the potential costs in time and money.

I have been working in decomissioning npps in germany for over a decade now which is why I feel so strongly about the knee-jerk conservative BS. no, there are not -a million ways- to make waste from nuclear power plants safe. even material released from regulations (concrete from decomissioned buildings for example or soil from the ground) has some residual radioactive particles and just like alcohol in pregnancies: there is no safe amount of exposure to radiation, just a lower risk of provoking potentially fatal genetic mutation that european regulators deem acceptable. but that in and of itself is not really problematic. It is just that we cannot assume ideal conditions for running these plants. while relatively safe during a well monitored and maintained period in the power producing state of a npp that changes radically if things go south. Just look at what happened to the zhaporizhia powerplant in ukraine they actively attacked a nuclear site! And all the meticulous precautions go out the window if a bunch of rogues decide to be stupid - just because. and tbf whatever mess the release of large amounts of radioactive particles does to our environment, economy and society i would rather not find out. as others have laid out here, there are safer and better suiting alternatives that are not coal.