Summary
A new Innofact poll shows 55% of Germans support returning to nuclear power, a divisive issue influencing coalition talks between the CDU/CSU and SPD.
While 36% oppose the shift, support is strongest among men and in southern and eastern Germany.
About 22% favor restarting recently closed reactors; 32% support building new ones.
Despite nuclear support, 57% still back investment in renewables. The CDU/CSU is exploring feasibility, but the SPD and Greens remain firmly against reversing the nuclear phase-out, citing stability and past policy shifts.
There’s no good reason to be against nuclear power. It’s green, it’s safe, it’s incredibly efficient, the fuel is virtually infinite, and the waste can be processed in a million different ways to make it not dangerous.
Ahh, you gotta keep in mind: useful idiots.
It’s incredibly expensive when all costs over the entire construction period, operating period, dismantling period and storage period for nuclear waste are taken into account.
How does the cost compare to the starting and operating a coal mine?
What about oil wells and refineries?
We’ve got other alternatives. I was not proposing to build coal mines.
It’s not a binary nuclear or coal choice.
Take 50 billion Euros, you want to invest in clean energy and have the biggest impact you can. You don’t buy one nuclear power plant, that’s for sure. You probably build multiple wind farms (around 10bn each) which, while intermittent, will each provide similar total energy over a year.
As for coal, it’s even more expensive when it kills off the planet.
No doubt but we have other viable options.
I’m not the kind to hate on nuclear power itself, but let’s not assume it’s perfect either. There are good reasons against nuclear power, its just not the usual reasons raised by people.
The cost and time effort needed for building one plant is one drawback.
The fact that you can’t say “let’s turn off the nuclear reactor now that we have enough renewables and later today we start it again when the sunlight is over”. It’s a terrible energy source to supply for extra demand needed without perfect planning.
Nowadays, nuclear is not so worth it in general, not because of fearmongering about the dangers (an old plant badly upkept is a danger, independent of what energy source you use, but specially for nuclear plants). Ideally a combination of different renewables would be best, with some energy storage to be used as backup, plus proper sharing of the resources between different places. There’s always sun somewhere, there’s always wind somewhere, …
It’s not perfect, but to forego nuclear energy while still burning fossil fuels is retarded.
Nobody is arguing for fossil fuels here.
So if our energy needs are not being met even while burning fossil fuels, why would you argue against nuclear energy which further reduces the supply of available energy?
Nuclear keeps us on the teet of fossils fuels for longer than switching to renewables. Nuclear takes too long to build. Renewables can come online incrementally displacing fossil fuels far sooner. It drops the rate of damage faster.
If we wait for nuclear plants that haven’t even been green lot yet the accumulated damage will be massive.
Yeah. You’re just showing us that you lack a fundamental understanding of how the power grid works.
It doesn’t, but I’d like to see you explain how.
No it doesn’t. We still need more energy sources.
Our energy needs are not being met right now. I can’t stress this enough: you simply do not have even a basic level of understanding about how the power grid works.
Yeah. You’re clueless.
As opposed to thinking we could replace fossil fuels with nuclear power faster than we can replace them with renewables which is obviously a totally sane belief given how large construction projects are going… /s
It’s more expensive than the alternatives, and comes with additional downsides. There is no good reason to be pro nuclear, unless you need a lot of power for a long time in a tight space. So a ship or a space station for example.
NGL, I dig the idea of Sodium plants:
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/energy-power-supply/pros-and-cons-of-sodium-cooled-nuclear-reactors-for-data-center-energy
Not sure how practical they are outside the general idea, but it looks promising.
Considering the current political climate I don’t think the world would look at Germany building breeder reactors (thats what these are, even if they desperately try to avoid that term) and just say “Great idea!” ;).
Jokes aside, breeders need at least one more generation of research/demo plants to be really commercially viable. Afaik all breeders so far had less than 50% uptime and none could avoid sodium fires. They would solve quite a few fuel problems tho conisering you can “burn” recycled U238 in them.
Personally I would prefer Thorium cycle plants, but those are even further off.
For Germany right now I don’t see much sense in building new current tech reactors. For the same tax money we would need to subsidize these plants, we could build so much more renewable (and storage) capacity which would result in a faster reduction of ghg emissions.
Even Japan is restarting their reactors
Solar and wind are great, but major industrialized nations will need some nuclear capacity.
It’s going to happen sooner or later.
The question is just about how long we delay it, with extra emissions and economic depression in the mean time.
Japan doesn’t have a huge amount of choice in energy generation. Off shore wind doesn’t work as the water is too deep. On shore wind doesn’t have the space or geography either. Solar works, but their weather isn’t ideal. Geothermal…possibly being near fault lines but their not like Iceland with a small population to supply. I believe locations for hydro are limited too.
Nuclear gives them energy independence and fits.
This exactly. You need a reliable source of fuel for the baseline, which is where nuclear energy can supplant fossil fuels instead of or in addition to relying on batteries.
No, nuclear is awful as a baseline since you can’t turn it off and back on quickly
You’re absolutely correct, and few people realise this. They think “baseline = stable power”, but that’s not what you need. You need a quick and cheap way to scale up production when renewables don’t produce enough. On a sunny, windy day, renewables already produce more than 100% of needs in some countries. At that point, the ‘baseline’ needs to shut down so that this cheap energy can be used instead. The baseline really is a stable base demand, but the supply has to be very flexible instead (due to the relative instability of solar and wind, the cheapest sources available).
Nuclear reactors can shut down quite quickly these days, but starting them back up is slow. But worse, nuclear is quite expensive, and maintaining a plant in standby mode not producing anything is just not economically feasible. Ergo, nuclear is terrible for a baseline power source (bar any future technological breakthroughs).
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/
Let’s see here… nuclear meltdowns have damaged the environments around the few plants that have experienced them.
Burning fossil fuels has damaged our entire planet…
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.
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.
Fukushima isn’t the big argument against nuclear.
IT’S TOO EXPENSIVE
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.
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
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.
No it’s not.
Wait until you see the price of climate change and not moving away from fossil fuels then
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).
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!
Hate to break it to you, bud, but energy is already priced according to how expensive it is to provide.
It’s not about “this energy source vs. that energy source.” It’s about increasing the supply of available energy.
Read a book on energy and you’ll quickly realize that as we produce more energy, we consume more. Right now, our energy needs are not being met even with fossil fuels + nuclear + renewables.
Hate to break it to you, but with a limited amount of money you can only increase your generation so much. Choosing a power source that’s less efficient from a monetary perspective means you can displace less fossil fuel.
Read a book on mathematics if you don’t believe me.
Wait what I am 100% pro renewables…
If nuclear somehow were the only option, I would support it. But it’s the worst option.
How do we supply power when renewables aren’t enough?
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
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.
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.
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.
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 overegulation), 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, not with all this overegulation, but still, even counting Fukushima and Chernobyl, more people die from wind (and especially fossil fuels) then nuclear per terawatt of electricity production.
Thank you for bringing some light to these people living in the dark.
I swear, some people see an influencer say “nuclear is actually really bad!” and then just take it and run.
Really puts into perspective how smart the average person in these days. They’re just trying to look good in front of their peers.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “Green” until we have a better way of disposing the waste that doesn’t involve creating new warning signs that can still be read and understood 10,000 years from now. :)
If it’s still a danger in 5,000 years, that’s not “green”. :)
Great story on the signage though!
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200731-how-to-build-a-nuclear-warning-for-10000-years-time
I’ve always preferred the IPCC terminology of “low-carbon”. Emphasizes that all power sources have carbon and other emissions at some point in their lifecycle. They also levelize the emissions based on energy produced over the expected lifespan of the power generation station/solar panel/dam/wind turbine/etc, and nuclear power is down there with solar, wind, geo, and hydro. Waste must be dealt with, and the best disposal method is reprocessing so you don’t have to store it.
Nuclear semiotics is fascinating. I was very excited when I came across the Federal Disposal Field in Fallout 76 and found that Bethesda used the “field of spikes” design.
This, it’s also pretty much the ONLY technology we have that can be near carbon neutral over time (mainly releasing carbon in the cement to make the plant, then to a lesser extent, mining to dig up and refine material, and transport of workers and goods).
The cost associated with nuclear is due to regulation and legal issues and not relating to the cost to build the actual plant itself so much. There are small scale reactors and many options. Yes it should be used wisely but we can’t keep burning fossil fuels.
lel mongo