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Germany shutting down last nuclear power plants on April 15th
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m k:
Local news, [not Sako] can't boost ammunition production, TikTok is using all electricity.

Here nuclear plant area must have lower background radiation than background.

One must wonder how much City Greens have been without energy.

E,
negation.
nctnico:

--- Quote from: tszaboo on April 10, 2023, 09:55:57 am ---I don't think we are dealing with this energy transition the most efficient way possible.

--- End quote ---
Indeed. If only Greenpeace et all didn't preach doom over nuclear, we would not have this energy crisis and CO2 problem in Europe. The French have been very clever with all their nuclear power plants (except for scheduling maintenance for half of the power plants at the same time).


--- Quote from: m k on April 10, 2023, 11:27:51 am ---Local news, Sako can't boost ammunition production, TikTok is using all electricity.

--- End quote ---
Just to those that don't know yet: I prefer funny cat videos over bullets  :-DD
james_s:

--- Quote from: nctnico on April 10, 2023, 12:22:49 pm ---Indeed. If only Greenpeace et all didn't preach doom over nuclear, we would not have this energy crisis and CO2 problem in Europe. The French have been very clever with all their nuclear power plants (except for scheduling maintenance for half of the power plants at the same time).

--- End quote ---

We would have been able to replace a lot of older plants with modern much safer and more efficient nuclear plants that produce less waste and have less chance of an accident.
Norbert:

--- Quote from: james_s on April 10, 2023, 05:38:16 pm ---  ›nuclear plants‹  …  ›less chance of an accident‹

--- End quote ---

Those  two terms really shouldn't be put in the same sentence.  8)

OTOH, I'm old, what do I care…
Kleinstein:
Building new nuclear power plants makes relatively limited sense.  Currently in many places the costs for wind-power or PV is considerably lower than for new nuclear. Even considering the need for some (e.g. 25%) storage new nuclear is hardly competative.
When calling for newer, safer designs this would likely add some 10-30 years of additional testing and developement with a somewhat uncertain result. Even build just new units of the old designs takes quite some time (e.g. 5-10 years) and the capacities to build new ones are limited.  The usual PWR build in Europe need very large steel forging parts. AFAIK only a single plant in Japan can make these and the capacitiy is quite limited.  Unless they build a new forge they may be faster with nuclear fusion than with getting a significant build up of new fission reactors.

Even if they would now want to extend the life-time for the few remaining German reactors, it would now take quite some time for a major revision and maininance and also to get new fuel. So they would be down for 1-2 years anyway. In hind-sight it may have been better to keep the reactors running for longer, but that decision point was some 5-10 years ago. All plans are made to shut them down. Already the last extension was only with reduced power, as the fuel was essentially used up.
Germany had to bring back some old coal power-plants last year. But this was not so much because of shutting down the German reactors, but because quite a lot of the French reactors were down for lack of cooling water and delayed maintainance.

I would consider calling for building new reactors now as a bad idea - it comes with a risk, too late and at high (hardly competative) costs. 
Nuclear on a large scale comes with 3 additional problems: 
1) When not running the reactors 24/7, but shut down in times of low demand, the already high costs additionally go up.  A limited power (like 25%) to run near 24/7 is not such an issue, but this still leaves a large part to come from other source.
2) Having many reactors of the same / similar type is a risky situation. The safety concepts usually call a prompt shut down if a problem with the design is found (e.g. like with the BWRs in Fukushima). Taking safety serious may than cause a black out. So one has to choose between safe or dependable. Given the hard choices and reaction after Fukushima (delaying safety upgrades to keep the reacrtor running) one can not really trust the promissed safety.
3) For a world wide large scale expansion of nuclear power the uranium reserves get critical and the fuel would get more expensive. It would at least need reprocessing of used fuel and this did not work out economically.
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