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German poll: Majority for return to nuclear energy
(www.dw.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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There’s nothing green, cheap, or safe about nuclear power. We’ve had three meltdowns already and two of them have ruined their surrounding environments:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_accident
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Mining for fuel ruins the water table:
A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas (contaminating the water table) https://www.wired.com/story/a-uranium-mining-boom-is-sweeping-through-texas-nuclear-energy/
Waste disposal, storage, and reprocessing are prohibitively expensive:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rethinking-nuclear-fuel-recycling/
Now list all the fossil fuels related incidents.
Nuclear + renewables is the way to go to stop the climate crisis in the foreseeable future.
People really don't understand that climate change is worse for life on this planet than a million Fukushima accidents.
Fukushima isn't the big argument against nuclear.
IT'S TOO EXPENSIVE
Wait until you see the price of climate change and not moving away from fossil fuels then
Wait what I am 100% pro renewables...
If nuclear somehow were the only option, I would support it. But it's the worst option.
Completely moving away from fossil fuels with just renewables is a pipe dream. Nuclear is not a panacea and it has its problems but it's part of the solution to get rid of fossil fuels entirely.
Just because you say so doesn't make it true
Well, good news, because I'm not the one saying it. That's coming from our Transmission Operator. Everything is detailed in their 992 page report:
https://www.rte-france.com/analyses-tendances-et-prospectives/bilan-previsionnel-2050-futurs-energetiques#Lesresultatsdeletude
What it says is that 100% renewables in France by 2050 is not possible, as the technology is not quite there yet, and also because our energy consumption ever keeps growing.
What they propose is a mix of nuclear and renewables to reach carbon neutrality, then phasing out nuclear over decades.
Well our power providers have different claims, but I would not trust either. They obviously have their own goals.
Ah yes, that's why we should invest money into an expensive form of energy instead of a cheap one, that will help us displace fossil fuels!
Speed! The best time to give a nuclear plant a green light was about 20 years ago, as it will just be coming online now. The second best time is never, because we don't have time to wait anymore.
Nuclear takes a long time to build, and in all that time you're not switching away from fossil fuels. I swear nuclear proponents are fossil fuel shills just wanting to delay the day we switch away from them.
Our largest power plant, with 6 reactors, was built in 6 years. To this day it provides us with around 6% of our global power requirements. It's been running for 45 years, producing 32TWh per year with 0 carbon emissions.
It's like we could build them faster if we wanted to ? We've done it already, we can do it again.
45 years would be 1980. That sounds like you're refering to Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, but construction started in 1980, and although the first five reactors went live 5 years later the 6th reactor didn't go live until 1996. 16 years later.
Even so, you're only counting construction. That plant would have been being designed for at least 5 years previous.
And safety standards have gone up since then, in part because of it's slightly older cousin at Chernobyl (different design, but also built in 5 years).
I'm talking about Gravelines in France. The first reactor was plugged into the national grid 6 years after construction began. The 6th reactor in 1985.
The EPR2 is already designed, and in service in Flamanville. Flamanville 3 took a long time because we had to rebuild our whole nuclear industry, by lack of political vision back in the 90's-00's.
We're building it again, two by two this time, and hopefully in less than half the time and budget.
Flamanville is EPR, not EPR2. Flamanville's delay is the reason for EPR2. EPR2 is not being built anywhere yet.
EPR is one of my go to examples of how long nuclear takes.
So I grant you that EDF needed to rebuild knowledge, but 12 years after they started the first plant they started HPC. They increased the timescale from 5 to 7 years construction, but are still going to be at least 6 years late and 35% over budget. On Sizewell they've added another 2 years minimum with a window up to 5 extra years over HPC....for the fifth site in the family. We should be accelerating now, right? Even in China the timescale was 9 years.
It's not just EDF. Westinghouse had similar problems with Vogtle 3 starting construction in 2009 and completing in 2023. 14 years construction again.
Can things get faster...sure, but 65% faster to get back down to 5 years. No.
The "expensive" argument is bollocks.
It's not too expensive for China, South Korea, Japan, the USA, France, the UAE, Iran, India, Russia.
The countries without nuclear will deindustrialize and the countries with nuclear will outcompete them.
Where is the evidence for that claim?
Germany is the obvious evidence for that claim. Their once great industry is doing really bad due to high energy prices. Which is why even they are second guessing the Energiewende.
Despite insane levels of investment in renewables, they are still stuck on gas en lignite and have very high energy prices.
Merkel's bet that Russian gas could always be depended on didn't work out.
The sabotage of solar and wind energy by Altmaier during the CDU government has had a bigger impact than the removal of the few percent of power we got from nuclear. Not to mention that nuclear fuel has the exact same problems as fossil fuels in that major sources of nuclear fuel are in Russia.
You guys have your heads so far up your asses, billions of subsidies for renewables were "sabotage".
If only even more billions would have been thrown against it, surely then it would have worked.
German anti-nuclear religion is so persistent and dogmatic, I'd rather debate the Taliban on Islam.
Luckily the smart Germans are changing course, as polls continue to show.
Merkel is a conservative. Their party stopped the original long term nuclear phase out, the original long term renewables build phase. Germany had a lot of photovoltaic industry back then. But the conservatives stopped the funding instead of phasing it out slowly.
It's all intentional mismanagement here for the profit of some energy CEOs and politicians
And ironically enough, Fukushima and Chernobyl have not been that bad for plant and animal life. The area around Chernobyl is thriving because most humans are gone.
Sources: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/how-chernobyl-has-become-unexpected-haven-wildlife
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/060418-chernobyl-wildlife-thirty-year-anniversary-science
It also caused a bunch of Russian soldiers to get sick because they dug holes in the ground. It isn't a nuclear paradise, and I'm not interested in Chernobyl-grown food, but it isn't a complete wasteland, either.
I was talking specifically about plant and animal life.
It's obviously not a paradise, but what I mean is, ionising radiation is literally less harmful to them than human presence. That's pretty bonkers to think about.
Leave that zone alone, let nature take over again and make it a monument to human hubris.
I don't think I talked about growing food in irradiated ground though? But, we currently are growing food in polluted ground thanks to fossil fuels (microplastics, coal dust, oil leaks, fracking in some backwards ass countries, etc.).
So how are burrowing animals doing? I've seen pretty pictures of deer and trees, how are the rabbits and foxes? What are their lifespans compared to those in other regions?
Just because the animals don't look like cutscenes from The 100 doesn't mean their life is idyllic, or even better than elsewhere. And all those animals are eating food grown in irradiated ground. Now, whether that's better or worse than microplastics and fossil fuel waste and leakage is another interesting question.
Three Mile Island was a partial meltdown, which may sound close to an actual meltdown, it's not even close in terms of danger.
Fukushima failed because the plants were old and not properly upkept. Had they followed the guidelines for keeping the plant maintained, it would not have happened.
That's not really the fault of nuclear power.
Chernobyl was also partially caused by lack of adherence to safety measures, but also faulty plant design.
I'd say, being generous, only one of those three events says anything about the safety of nuclear power, and even then, we have come a very long way.
So one event... Ever.
Chernobyl shouldn't have happened due to safety measures, yet it did. Fukushima shouldn't have happened, yet it did. The common denominator is human error, but guess who'll be running any other nuclear power plants? Not beavers.
Fukushima's reactors were extremely old, even at the time. We're not even talking about the same technology. Shit has come a very long way.
Sure, and the next catastrophe will have some good reason too, yet it will happen due to human error and greed.
Unlike the complete safety of fossil fuels.
Because everyone knows there's literally only fossil fuels and nuclear energy, nothing else.
Cool, so continue to pretend that you didn't see the chart in this very thread? Here it is again:
There is more to the calculation of risk than just looking at this data. You know very well how large the impact of individual disasters is.
That must be why you people are suggesting to turn the extremely old German reactors back on that have had limited maintenance under the assumption that they would be turned off for decades now.
Is that what I did? Well that's news to me!
How is a nuclear meltdown not the fault of nuclear power? Of course you can prevent it by being super careful and stuff, but it is inherent to nuclear power that it is super dangerous. What is the worst that can happen with a wind turbine? It falls, that's it.
Fukushima had a fucking earthquake and a tsunami thrown at it, AND the company which made it cut corners. It was still, much, much less bad than it could have been and the reactor still partially withstood a lot of damage.
In the United States at least (and i assume the rest of the world) nuclear energy is so overegulated that many reactors can have meltdowns without spelling disaster for the nearby area. Nuclear caskets (used to transport and store wastes) can withstand fucking missle strikes.
Im not going to pretend that there arent genuine issues with nuclear, such as cost and construction time(*partially caused by the over regulation), but genuine nuclear disaster has only ever resulted from the worst of human decisions combined with the worst of circumstances. Do i trust humans not to make shitty mistakes? No, with all this overegulation though i kind of do. Even counting Fukushima and Chernobyl, more people die from wind (and especially fossil fuels) then nuclear per terawatt of electricity production.
Because the shit they were using in the Fukushima plants was so old that it might as well be completely different technology. Same with Chernobyl.
People are referencing shit that does not even apply to modern nuclear power.