You’re right too. That’s why it’s a difficult question. But putting lives of millions at the risk of immediate death to save billions’ long term health is ehh kinda bad too. It’s my personal opinion though
Your personal opinion is wrong, I’m sorry I am being so brash but I don’t know how else to say it. The fly ash from fossil fuel combustion contains radioactive material that’s spread over an enormous area when it’s burnt. The amount of radioactive exposure we receive everyday from burning fossil fuels is orders of magnitude more than all the nuclear accidents combined. As counter intuitive as it is, closing nuclear power plants exposes the general public to more radiation not less.
In my personal opinion, globally humanity should not be building very many new nuclear reactors. Admittedly there are certain applications that nuclear energy is the responsible choice. Renewable energy sources are the clear winner, safe, reliable. Closing the nuclear power plants we have will only accelerate climate change and in a roundabout way expose us to more radiation. I realize that nuclear energy is scary but the dangers we don’t immediately see from fossil fuels are worse.
It’s not a question of either coal or nuclear. We have to get rid of both and that is exactly what’s happening in Germany at the moment. 2023 was the end of nuclear power production. 2038 is scheduled to be the end of coal power production and 2045 is scheduled to be the year of climate neutrality. Germany is one of eleven countries to have made this a law.
It’s not a “personal opinion.” And your “opinion” is NOT of equal worth to factual information. You’re just trying to save face because you don’t like admitting when you’re wrong. Maybe find some factual information that backs up your perspective rather than just baselessly claim that nuclear reactors put “millions at risk of immediate death” and run away when you can’t back it up. All it takes is a quick google search to disprove how it puts “millions at risk of immediate death.”
I have other things to do rather than “saving my face” on a random political forum. I commented using my own personal opinion and I didn’t ask for a discussion. Of course most of the people are going to disagree and they do have the right to do so. Also, everyone has their own moral beliefs and value of facts. Mine are just not common
Look, if your personal opinion of the moon is that it’s a hologram, it’s definitely worth less than, say, Buzz Aldrin’s opinion of the moon being made of rock.
I don’t know who told you a personal opinion is worth exactly as much as someone else’s, but they were wrong.
Giving value to bad opinions like “Oh Trump won we gotta storm the capitol” or “Vaccines cause autism” or “Nuclear is worse than coal” and refusing to engage with all evidence of the contrary and just leaving the conversation by saying “Mine are just not common” is an extremely unhealthy way to be a part of society. I live in Australia and the bush fires are getting worse. There’s a noticeable cost of lives and livelihoods. You’re not saving millions of lives from a nuclear meltdown by tearing down nuclear plants. You’re putting millions of lives in danger from climate disasters by tearing down nuclear plants.
I’d say I define a “personal opinion/belief” and a “scientific fact-proven piece of information” as different things. Personal opinions may be inspired by and dependent on religions, preferences, radical moral positions and other things (fact-proven information can be like that too but it’s different). Though I don’t know if it’s any right
No, their opinion is worth more than yours because it’s better supported by material facts
You’re wrong and because you’re a deeply unserious person you’re trying to exit the interaction without learning or growing as a person by pulling this false modesty bullshit.
This is the list of the thirty worst accidents in civilian nuclear power plants. These have all been categorised as having caused substantial health damage. There is a definite risk in using nuclear energy
The above data include accidents. You are literally killing people by not going nuclear. Nuclear accidents are highly publicized but if (hypothetically) one person dies for every wind installation but they never make the news, it’s a death by a thousand cuts, and nuclear comes out ahead. That is hyperbolic but it’s emblematic of the situation, look at the fucking numbers. Nuclear is safer.
It’s not a choice of either nuclear or coal power. We have to and we as a society decided to phase both of them out. Because of the concerns regarding nuclear energy production and the waste being produced, Germany opted for phasing out nuclear power production in 2023 and aims to phase out coal power production in 2038 in order to get climate neutral by 2045 by using renewables energy in conjunction with green hydrogen power plants, of which forty are planned to be build in the foreseeable future.
Nuclear power production is not risk free, and there have been massive contamination of ground water in Germany in the old storage facility “Asse”. The situation in there is so horrific, that it has been decided to get all the nuclear waste out again and store it on the surface again.
I don’t think the effects of mistakes like these in handling nuclear waste are included in the before mentioned data. As are the possible horrific scenarios with high level nuclear waste stored on the surface.
“Massive contamination”, “horrific”, and yet the article points out most of the seepage is radiologically harmless. It is important to clear out the mine and it will be really expensive, I won’t deny that, but let’s not scaremonger and act like it’s Chernobyl 2. As well, let’s not pretend that new nuclear projects would suffer the same problems. A functioning country would see this mistake, regulate how waste can be stored, and that would be the end of it. As many other countries have done.
Let’s be clear: nuclear waste is a solved issue. We know how to store it safely, we know how to reprocess fuel to make it safe within hundreds instead of thousands of years. Whether or not we do that is an entirely political question.
And what then is the alternative? Wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine. Battery storage would be prohibitively expensive and the amount of lithium required to be mined to supply an entire country’s electricity storage needs would be horrendous for the environment. Hydroelectric storage is ecologically devastating to a scale the public is largely unaware of and geography-dependent.
I am very skeptical about green hydrogen because it is far too politically easy to sweep the source of your hydrogen under the rug under bureaucratic obfuscation and the most economically viable method to produce hydrogen is to use fossil fuels and emit CO2 in the process, making it not really green.
“Every day, 13,000 liters of water flow into the Asse II nuclear waste storage facility in Lower Saxony, which is in danger of collapsing”
“There are quite a few quantities. If you just think about it: these 102 tons of uranium, 87 tons of thorium, then these 28 kilograms of plutonium. And then we have a mix of many different chemotoxic agents and pesticides. We have about 500 kilograms of arsenic. And plutonium is not only radioactive, it is deadly even at the size of a grain of dust. You shouldn’t even think about what would happen if this shaft were to flood, that would still be possible. And the mountain really pushes upwards due to its pressure. Into the groundwater. That’s a catastrophe.”
“These are waters that have direct contact with the radioactive waste, they run through a storage chamber and there we obviously have different pollution than with this water, which we collect up here…”
“We have pictures from the chamber where we see, among other things, a yellow metal barrel that was squeezed between a concrete barrel and a chamber wall, meaning it was completely destroyed by the rock mechanical pressure. And we have also seen damaged lost concrete shields.”
As stated before the idea is to employ renewable energy to produce green hydrogen for use in gas power plants. If you have no more coal power plants which is the target for 2038, you can not use it for hydrogen production. Germany wants to be self sufficient with regard to energy production, so we will have no other way to produce the hydrogen.
You are right in being sceptical, but IMHO the strategy is viable and can be implemented. And producing zero nuclear waste and be climate neutral at the same time is something we will have to achieve in the near future.
What does Chernobyl have to do with modern reactors. Not to mention that even Chernobyl was a result of a poorly thought out experiment as opposed to some inherent flaw in the reactor.
That’s objectively untrue. The RBMK reactor type as it was used in Chernobyl has a design flaw. It’s called the positive void effect:
This positive coefficient was another key aspect of the RBMK in reactor unit 4 of the Chernobyl power plant. In the events of the accident, the excess production of steam (meaning an increase of voids) caused the void coefficient to become unsafely large. When the power began to increase, even more steam was produced, which in turn led to an increase in power.[2] This led the reactor to produce over 100x its rated power output, causing extreme temperatures and pressures inside the core, and causing failure.
The positive void coefficient was directly responsible for the disaster: During low power operations the effect caused water vapour bubbles to be created in the reactor. Because of the lower density of the vapour the moderation of the reaction did no longer work and the reactor spiraled out of control. All the while there was no feedback to the control room about the increased reactivity, so the personal had no chance to assess the situation correctly. This lead to the uncontrolled chain reaction and the explosion of block 4.
After a while Nikolai Steinberg conducted an experiment in the other blocks of Chernobyl which showed that the positive void coefficient was causing the reactor to spiral out of control in low energy production scenarios.
That’s not right. The experiment was conducted after the explosion in an effort to prove Nikolai Steinberg’s suspicion that the positive void coefficient caused the disaster. The experiment was a success and Steinberg’s suspicions have been verified.
German goverment seems to be pretty hazardous to me. This coal shit, participation in Ukraine war, repression of people protesting against genocide in Gaza, supporting said genocide, vassalization to most dangerous belligerent government on Earth…
The data include accidents. You might feel differently about wind if a loved one died doing a wind turbine installation. The logic goes both ways.
I will reiterate: it’s literally safer than wind.
Look at the fucking numbers and not your feelings.
People are really bad at calculating risk. Everyone will die from climate change. Some people might die from a radioactive leak.
Climate change is this nebulous thing that feels impersonal and a lot of people kind of don’t even really believe in so they think it’s an acceptable compromise.
I understand and support the idea. Even though nuclear power can significantly reduce carbon emissions, it might put lives of millions at risk
carbon emissions put lives of billions at risk
The cartoon is not really about building twice as many new nuclear power plants, but using and maintaining and upgrading the ones we already have.
You’re right too. That’s why it’s a difficult question. But putting lives of millions at the risk of immediate death to save billions’ long term health is ehh kinda bad too. It’s my personal opinion though
Your personal opinion is wrong, I’m sorry I am being so brash but I don’t know how else to say it. The fly ash from fossil fuel combustion contains radioactive material that’s spread over an enormous area when it’s burnt. The amount of radioactive exposure we receive everyday from burning fossil fuels is orders of magnitude more than all the nuclear accidents combined. As counter intuitive as it is, closing nuclear power plants exposes the general public to more radiation not less.
In my personal opinion, globally humanity should not be building very many new nuclear reactors. Admittedly there are certain applications that nuclear energy is the responsible choice. Renewable energy sources are the clear winner, safe, reliable. Closing the nuclear power plants we have will only accelerate climate change and in a roundabout way expose us to more radiation. I realize that nuclear energy is scary but the dangers we don’t immediately see from fossil fuels are worse.
It’s not a question of either coal or nuclear. We have to get rid of both and that is exactly what’s happening in Germany at the moment. 2023 was the end of nuclear power production. 2038 is scheduled to be the end of coal power production and 2045 is scheduled to be the year of climate neutrality. Germany is one of eleven countries to have made this a law.
I will not argue. My personal opinion is not worth more than yours and vice versa
It’s not a “personal opinion.” And your “opinion” is NOT of equal worth to factual information. You’re just trying to save face because you don’t like admitting when you’re wrong. Maybe find some factual information that backs up your perspective rather than just baselessly claim that nuclear reactors put “millions at risk of immediate death” and run away when you can’t back it up. All it takes is a quick google search to disprove how it puts “millions at risk of immediate death.”
https://world-nuclear.org/nuclear-essentials/what-are-the-effects-of-nuclear-accidents.aspx
Happy cake day Hestia! Doing the good work in the posting trenches
I don’t think this is a credible source. Have you checked who the members of this organisation are? https://www.world-nuclear.org/our-association/membership/our-members.aspx
This is s lobby organisation to support the nuclear power producers.
I have other things to do rather than “saving my face” on a random political forum. I commented using my own personal opinion and I didn’t ask for a discussion. Of course most of the people are going to disagree and they do have the right to do so. Also, everyone has their own moral beliefs and value of facts. Mine are just not common
Look, if your personal opinion of the moon is that it’s a hologram, it’s definitely worth less than, say, Buzz Aldrin’s opinion of the moon being made of rock.
I don’t know who told you a personal opinion is worth exactly as much as someone else’s, but they were wrong.
Giving value to bad opinions like “Oh Trump won we gotta storm the capitol” or “Vaccines cause autism” or “Nuclear is worse than coal” and refusing to engage with all evidence of the contrary and just leaving the conversation by saying “Mine are just not common” is an extremely unhealthy way to be a part of society. I live in Australia and the bush fires are getting worse. There’s a noticeable cost of lives and livelihoods. You’re not saving millions of lives from a nuclear meltdown by tearing down nuclear plants. You’re putting millions of lives in danger from climate disasters by tearing down nuclear plants.
I hope you change for the better.
I’d say I define a “personal opinion/belief” and a “scientific fact-proven piece of information” as different things. Personal opinions may be inspired by and dependent on religions, preferences, radical moral positions and other things (fact-proven information can be like that too but it’s different). Though I don’t know if it’s any right
You’re commenting on a political forum and you’re NOT looking for a discussion?
Yes because I’m trying to be above the arguing masses. Though I do admit that I’m still not that good at it unfortunately
No, their opinion is worth more than yours because it’s better supported by material facts
You’re wrong and because you’re a deeply unserious person you’re trying to exit the interaction without learning or growing as a person by pulling this false modesty bullshit.
Makes sense
Reddit brain
I’m not pro nuclear but this is a bit silly
It’s literally safer than wind
This is the list of the thirty worst accidents in civilian nuclear power plants. These have all been categorised as having caused substantial health damage. There is a definite risk in using nuclear energy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents
The above data include accidents. You are literally killing people by not going nuclear. Nuclear accidents are highly publicized but if (hypothetically) one person dies for every wind installation but they never make the news, it’s a death by a thousand cuts, and nuclear comes out ahead. That is hyperbolic but it’s emblematic of the situation, look at the fucking numbers. Nuclear is safer.
It’s not a choice of either nuclear or coal power. We have to and we as a society decided to phase both of them out. Because of the concerns regarding nuclear energy production and the waste being produced, Germany opted for phasing out nuclear power production in 2023 and aims to phase out coal power production in 2038 in order to get climate neutral by 2045 by using renewables energy in conjunction with green hydrogen power plants, of which forty are planned to be build in the foreseeable future.
Nuclear power production is not risk free, and there have been massive contamination of ground water in Germany in the old storage facility “Asse”. The situation in there is so horrific, that it has been decided to get all the nuclear waste out again and store it on the surface again.
https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell-Endlager-Asse-Der-lange-Weg-zur-Raeumung,asse1410.html
Google translate: https://www-ndr-de.translate.goog/geschichte/schauplaetze/Marodes-Atommuell-Endlager-Asse-Der-lange-Weg-zur-Raeumung,asse1410.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
I don’t think the effects of mistakes like these in handling nuclear waste are included in the before mentioned data. As are the possible horrific scenarios with high level nuclear waste stored on the surface.
“Massive contamination”, “horrific”, and yet the article points out most of the seepage is radiologically harmless. It is important to clear out the mine and it will be really expensive, I won’t deny that, but let’s not scaremonger and act like it’s Chernobyl 2. As well, let’s not pretend that new nuclear projects would suffer the same problems. A functioning country would see this mistake, regulate how waste can be stored, and that would be the end of it. As many other countries have done.
Let’s be clear: nuclear waste is a solved issue. We know how to store it safely, we know how to reprocess fuel to make it safe within hundreds instead of thousands of years. Whether or not we do that is an entirely political question.
Regarding the safety of surface level waste: https://youtu.be/lhHHbgIy9jU
And what then is the alternative? Wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine. Battery storage would be prohibitively expensive and the amount of lithium required to be mined to supply an entire country’s electricity storage needs would be horrendous for the environment. Hydroelectric storage is ecologically devastating to a scale the public is largely unaware of and geography-dependent.
I am very skeptical about green hydrogen because it is far too politically easy to sweep the source of your hydrogen under the rug under bureaucratic obfuscation and the most economically viable method to produce hydrogen is to use fossil fuels and emit CO2 in the process, making it not really green.
“Every day, 13,000 liters of water flow into the Asse II nuclear waste storage facility in Lower Saxony, which is in danger of collapsing”
“There are quite a few quantities. If you just think about it: these 102 tons of uranium, 87 tons of thorium, then these 28 kilograms of plutonium. And then we have a mix of many different chemotoxic agents and pesticides. We have about 500 kilograms of arsenic. And plutonium is not only radioactive, it is deadly even at the size of a grain of dust. You shouldn’t even think about what would happen if this shaft were to flood, that would still be possible. And the mountain really pushes upwards due to its pressure. Into the groundwater. That’s a catastrophe.”
“These are waters that have direct contact with the radioactive waste, they run through a storage chamber and there we obviously have different pollution than with this water, which we collect up here…”
“We have pictures from the chamber where we see, among other things, a yellow metal barrel that was squeezed between a concrete barrel and a chamber wall, meaning it was completely destroyed by the rock mechanical pressure. And we have also seen damaged lost concrete shields.”
Source: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/marodes-atommuelllager-die-wachsende-gefahr-von-asse-ii-100.html
There is no long term storage site for high level nuclear waste in Germany. So the issue of nuclear waste is clearly not solved.
Intermediate storage facilities for high level nuclear waste are a security concern:
https://www.bund.net/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/
Google translation: https://www-bund-net.translate.goog/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp
As stated before the idea is to employ renewable energy to produce green hydrogen for use in gas power plants. If you have no more coal power plants which is the target for 2038, you can not use it for hydrogen production. Germany wants to be self sufficient with regard to energy production, so we will have no other way to produce the hydrogen.
You are right in being sceptical, but IMHO the strategy is viable and can be implemented. And producing zero nuclear waste and be climate neutral at the same time is something we will have to achieve in the near future.
That’s an american vision. Let’s see what you’d say if half of your relatives were victims of the Chernobyl
What does Chernobyl have to do with modern reactors. Not to mention that even Chernobyl was a result of a poorly thought out experiment as opposed to some inherent flaw in the reactor.
That’s objectively untrue. The RBMK reactor type as it was used in Chernobyl has a design flaw. It’s called the positive void effect:
This positive coefficient was another key aspect of the RBMK in reactor unit 4 of the Chernobyl power plant. In the events of the accident, the excess production of steam (meaning an increase of voids) caused the void coefficient to become unsafely large. When the power began to increase, even more steam was produced, which in turn led to an increase in power.[2] This led the reactor to produce over 100x its rated power output, causing extreme temperatures and pressures inside the core, and causing failure.
Source: https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/RBMK
What caused the accident?
The positive void coefficient was directly responsible for the disaster: During low power operations the effect caused water vapour bubbles to be created in the reactor. Because of the lower density of the vapour the moderation of the reaction did no longer work and the reactor spiraled out of control. All the while there was no feedback to the control room about the increased reactivity, so the personal had no chance to assess the situation correctly. This lead to the uncontrolled chain reaction and the explosion of block 4.
After a while Nikolai Steinberg conducted an experiment in the other blocks of Chernobyl which showed that the positive void coefficient was causing the reactor to spiral out of control in low energy production scenarios.
Sources:
https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_28271/chernobyl-chapter-i-the-site-and-accident-sequence
There’s a really good documentary about that, but alas it’s in German: https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/zdfinfo-doku/tschernobyl-die-katastrophe-paradies-100.html
Nikolai Steinberg also coauthored a book about the accident: https://www.perlego.com/book/3418623/chernobyl-past-present-and-future-pdf
To sum up, there was an experiment conducted that caused the disaster, as opposed to it being a result of normal operation of the reactor.
That’s not right. The experiment was conducted after the explosion in an effort to prove Nikolai Steinberg’s suspicion that the positive void coefficient caused the disaster. The experiment was a success and Steinberg’s suspicions have been verified.
That’s right but Chernobyl wasn’t the only incident. There was one in Japan too…
Ah yes, I totally forgot about all those land tsunamis Germans have to worry about.
There are other hazards as unlikely as Tsunamis.
do tell
German goverment seems to be pretty hazardous to me. This coal shit, participation in Ukraine war, repression of people protesting against genocide in Gaza, supporting said genocide, vassalization to most dangerous belligerent government on Earth…
Wars
deleted by creator
I’m sure you have the capacity to think of some on your own and don’t need my help with that.
The data include accidents. You might feel differently about wind if a loved one died doing a wind turbine installation. The logic goes both ways. I will reiterate: it’s literally safer than wind. Look at the fucking numbers and not your feelings.
Those are global death rates not death rates in the United States.
It might out millions of lives at risk (extremely low risk) whereas we know that CO2 from burning coal is putting billions of lives at risk.
People are really bad at calculating risk. Everyone will die from climate change. Some people might die from a radioactive leak.
Climate change is this nebulous thing that feels impersonal and a lot of people kind of don’t even really believe in so they think it’s an acceptable compromise.