Past history is a bad indicator for future risk when the costs are so high.
And the reason why there were so few fatalities was because huge chunks of land have been evacuated every time and costly cleanup operations have been undertaken. The risk is not just lives lost, but rather the impact on those countries' economy.
You ignore fat-tail risks. The incident in Fukushima is already hugely expensive and the expense keeps growing.
Relying on past frequencies for future risk assessment is dangerous, especially when there is this high of a cost. Especially on the organization level of the decision makers: Maybe on average the risk for the global population is acceptable, but if a country like Germany loses part of its territory to a nuclear accident, that would be huge tragedy for the country and its economy. Germany is NOT replacing nuclear with lignite 1:1, much less in the long term. Anyone who says so is lying. And even those plants MAY have more risk, but that risk is hugely more predictable!
I am accounting for fat tail risks, I'm literally accounting for a nuclear accident happening every year, how is that not a "Fat tail risk"? The plausible fat tail of nuclear accidents being the everyday of lignite is the problem, the death toll of lignite is in the ballpark of 1000x higher. Having CONSISTENTLY 1000x higher deaths is not really a merit.
Sure nuclear meltdowns making territory unusuable sucks, but the mining does actually present a fair amount of ecological damage itself, and I think there's more metrics than potential territory loss. Notably lignites causes more radiation to enter the atmosphere, but unlike nuclear, this isn't neatly concentrated in one area people can just stay out of, which isn't conducive to people not dying.
I could maybe humour the argument that nuclear waste storage (Even accounting for these being very little of it, there will be very little of it for a very long time) or especially nuclear power plants encouraging nuclear weapons development being fat tail risks, but accidents, no. We're never going to see dramatic nuclear meltdowns even get close to causing the death toll of lignite, it just is way too implausible.
It is not only the death count. Large parts of Bavaria are still contaminated from the Chernobyl accident. They decontaminated most fields, but mushrooms and especial wild boar from the forests (they eat the mushrooms a lot) are only to be eaten with care (and the pigs should be all checked for radiation whether they are safe for eating at all, but of course that doesn't always happen).
I agree that it's not only the death count, but what do you do with contamination caused by fossil fuels? The radioactive isotopes released by burning coal are released gradually and everywhere, not concentrated into a certain region. If you want to eat mushrooms at all, you will eat mushrooms with coal-related contaminants. How much damage is that worth?
At least with Chernobyl, you can escape contamination by avoiding Bavarian mushrooms.
I'd like to see some sources for the claim that this death toll is so much higher - on a per kW basis. And even that assumes that scaling up the number of nuclear plants scales the risk up linearly, which is probably impossible because regulations, standards and democratic participation would have to be lowered.
How would you convince me to take a guaranteed small cut to my life quality compared to taking a very low chance of earlier death?
In the end, the high impact risks of nuclear are of extremely low probability, and they compound better than fossi fuels: we have 1 30km-radius exclusion zone and some smaller non-exclusion cleanup efforts for some 1PWh(? can't find the number right now) of energy total. When an event like that happens, the affected population is tiny, and they are able to move out at a moderate one-time cost.
Meanwhile, fossil fuel generation downsides are inescapeable: every plant decreases the quality of life for every person, and we cannot escape it. How many people have died early because of the unescapeable, permanent health damage for each PWh of energy produced? There's no exclusion zone at all, so there's no ability to pay a one time price and be spared the long-term effects.
Which kind of generation has "this high of a cost"? What should be the average damage to the population which we take as a baseline?
You're still lying about the alternatives to nuclear power. You are still underestimating the impact of a nuclear disaster. You are still underestimating the risk of a nuclear disaster. These things have always occurred more frequently than expected, and we haven't seen anyone intentionally blow up a nuclear facility yet. The possibility for someone to actually make that happen intentionally (as supposed to the also criminal but less intentional neglect in the case of Fukushima) makes the risk calculations around nuclear impossible.
I'm not estimating anything, I'm asking you to provide the proof of coal's superiority over nuclear. If the numbers are so clear in favor of coal's guaranteed damage against nuclear's risks, you should have no problem convincing me.
So go ahead, show us the estimates. And if you say that estimating is impossible, then why do you insist my estimate is wrong? Sorry, I'm not buying the "impossible" part. Show us the data and the reasoning.
My point is actually that the risk of coal is calculable and the risk of nuclear is not. And if you provide any estimate, it is most certainly wrong, because it is based on false and dangerous assumptions.
Yet you repeat the lie that coal power is the only alternative to nuclear. That convenient lie is the core assumption between most or all your arguments.
Estimates are by definition most certainly wrong. And despite that, you think your high estimates are better than my low estimates. By your own logic, you're wrong and lacking an argument. Claiming that coal is better than nuclear is wrong by your own logic.
And if there are wrong assumptions stopping a wrong estimate, then certainly replacing them with right assumptions will make an estimate less wrong?
Also, please show where I say that coal is the only alternative or shut up. I'm only talking about coal because it's such a weak hill you chose to die on.
Bullshit. There was no "decision" in the refugee crisis, we had to take in the refugees because of our constitution and frankly because we (constitutionally and fortunately) don't have the means to get rid of them even if we wanted to.
So far everything works well for Germany. Relying on Russian gas meant cheaper power for quite some time. Hard to tell if alternatives would have fared better. Hindsight is always 20/20. Putin's invasion of Ukraine is irrational from any standpoint and not expecting him and his country shooting themselves in their feet that way wasn't illogical.
To be honest, there were plenty of warnings. Putins wars in Chechenia, Georgia. And he actually invaded Ukraine in 2014. That was the last date after which the German government should have planned for a future without gas from Russia.
Which isn't what you and others said at the time, I'd guess. Hardly anyone was advocating for this. None of the major parties for certain. Nobody wanted more expensive energy.
Sorry, why would you say such a thing about me? I was actually quite concerned by the absence of a strong international and especially German reaction to the invasion of 2014. Especially it became obvious, that all the Nordstream pipelines were a weapon against the Ukraine.
It's not the replacement. The argument that "lignite" plants replaced nuclear power is mostly wrong. Especially not long term. But this argument is highly convenient for people who are delusional over the benefits of nuclear power.
There is a distinct increase of coal-burning plants in the article a couple years ago, suggesting that they are partially a replacement. But what I actually want to highlight is that every nuclear plant closed instead of a closed coal plant shows how much safety is valued by those making decisions.
Because coal plants have been allowed to remain after forced closure of nuclear plants, safety is not the actual reason why nuclear plants are removed in Germany.
Those coal plants aren't operating at peak capacity, or at all, in some case. The suggestion they are replacing nuclear power 1:1 is a highly convenient lie.
The idea that coal power is less safe is bullshit. Nuclear power carries tail-heavy risk, coal plants have much more predictable risk. Nuclear power is only safer if you assume nothing happens that didn't happen in the past few decades and nobody actually deliberately blows up a nuclear power plant. Once you can't assume both, all risk calculations for nuclear power are meaningless.
Operating at less than peak capacity doesn't make burning coal any more healthy, and doesn't make the decision to not retire them any more safety-oriented.
You still don't understand. A coal power plant that doesn't run doesn't produce harmful emissions. And at lower capacity they produce less emissions, proportionately.
And you are still lying about coal being the only replacement for nuclear.
This is a situation incompatible with a policy of increasing safety. Increasing safety means shutting down unsafe sources while keeping or rolling out safe sources, which is the opposite of the short-term trend. So the short-term policy goal was something other than safety.
German TUV director on nuclear power plants:
"The plants are in a technically excellent condition," Joachim Buehler, managing director at TUEV, told Reuters, adding that an extensive check, which is usually done every 10 years, was necessary but could be done within a few months.
Because electricity demand fluctuates. It's uneconomical to build enough nuclear capacity to satisfy peak demand. So even if you were to go to 100% nuclear, you'd have to store the excess power to satisfy the peaks.
As gas fueled heating is phased out, most of Northern and Central Europe will get the same kind of seasonal demand as in Norway/Sweden. That is, much higher demand during winter.
There are very few places in Europe (outside of Norway/Sweden) where such long-term storage (sevel months worth) could be built at a competitive price. Currently, storage is usually counted in minutes to single digit hours, even in the optimistic plans.
So, barring some extreme breakthrough in storage technology, the only way to remove the reliance on fossil fuels, is to have significantly more plannable peak capacity than low season consumption.
In the case of nuclear, the main ways to bring prices down would be to create standardized and predictable regulations with a better thought out balance between the economic and health/safety costs, while also encouraging innovations and economies of scale to drive costs down in most other parts of the economy.
If costs could be reduced to €20-€40/MWh, some overcapacity would be ok.
And if you have enough for peak demand (which France for a while mostly had), you run into the opposite problem of having too much power production when you don't need it. Nuclear reactors are not only slow to switch power output, but they cannot be run below a certain output level (like 40-50%) without shutting down entirely. On top of that, running nuclear reactors on average significantly below maximum output drives the cost up further.
Of course running below maximum output drives up cost. Are you disagreeing with basic math? Consumption of fuel is not the main cost of a nuclear power plant, and even if you shut it down completely, it still needs external power for the cooling.
Electricity demand does fluctuate, but so does supply from renewables. I think it is easier to store excess power than to deal with power shortage in case of bad weather.
It is true that the problem of storing energy exists in both cases, but as far as I understand with renewables you lose reliability (in comparison to nuclear power).
That's not how it works. I don't know the actual numbers, but what if peak load is 50% higher than average load? You need quite a lot of battery storage to make that work, especially if the peak load lasts longer than a few minutes (it usually does).
And that's true even assuming instant capacity adaptation. It's just not efficient to keep nuclear power at a capacity lower than their peak capacity.
> I don't know the actual numbers, but what if peak load is 50% higher than average load
You'd know if you read the link I provided.
Nuclear plants in Germany had no issues scaling up and down between 400-600MW and 1200-1400MW per reactor per day.
Now, with renewables you do have this issue. Because due to their intermittent nature you're required to both overbuild them and provide enough grid-scale storage to last for hours.
> It's just not efficient to keep nuclear power at a capacity lower than their peak capacity.
For some politically-motivated definition of efficient. Additional costs to running nuclear plants in load following mode are immaterial.
How is it immaterial to build twice as many nuclear power plants as necessary instead of using energy storage? You'd have to believe battery storage is way more expensive than an idle nuclear plant. But that's just not the case. The real killer in that comparison is that people really don't want to live near a nuclear plant and in any case, regulation and such politics makes it hard or impossible to scale up nuclear power in that way.
You don't get the fact that nuclear power requires just as much storage, right
France has this problem in a hidden way: They have to import power in the summer, because they DONT have that peak capacity, nuclear or otherwise. To provide that with nuclear, they would either need storage or increase the number of their nuclear plants, and probably like 50%.
It's not baseload if it's not on all the time. The point of the article is that what was previously supplied by "baseload" is now generated from a flexible mix, with hardly anything generating 100% of the time.
And one needs to understand that "base load" is mostly a concept important for slow, bad to regulate power plants. In those times, a lot of effort was spent on creating "base load" so the power plants have the least requirement for regulation. This will switch to more agile consumption where you get much cheaper electricity when you can time your consumption. So the amount of energy which was previously part of "base load" will be reduced considerably.
No, renewables are easy to regulate and nothing about them is slow. You can regulate solar in milliseconds, wind in a couple of seconds. They don't have to produce when there is no demand.
And yes, you have to provide as much electricity as is pulled from the grid. But that does no longer have to be done in a constant fashion as with nuclear and coal. That is why I write that "base load" is reduced. Overall energy consumption isn't. It will actually rise with the electrification of mobility and heating. That is, why there is a need for a huge buildup of renewables.
Your arguments are fueled by a lack of understanding.
Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier. The stability argument is just populistic bullshit. Plausible on the surface, not a concern in actual practice. You are acting like those who plan and build this renewable capacity never thought of that.
The goal with renewables is to reduce the total emissions. There are still plenty of years left in that process before you even need any storage to cover capacity fluctuation. Because even when covering SOME extra capacity with fossil fuels SOME of the times, total emissions are still getting reduced. Is it that some people just want to ignore that a coal plant that doesn't produce energy also doesn't produce emissions?
> Ramping down renewables is lots faster and easier.
And the source for this is? Because reality seems to disagree with you
> The stability argument is just populistic bullshit. Plausible on the surface, not a concern in actual practice
You're surprised that renewable energy is intermittent and you need to significantly overbuild them?
> You are acting like those who plan and build this renewable capacity never thought of that.
So many decisions in this space are made purely for political points, so you can see how yes, people who are building this rarely if ever talk abou this.
> The goal with renewables is to reduce the total emissions.
Note how if you don't shut down nuclear power plants you don't need to burn coal to make up for the difference.
Nuclear power has high upfront investments, always. And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget. After a couple of decades of this, reasonable people may come to the conclusion that these investments and risks are quite "inherent".
Your comparison is meaningless, because the 150 billion € investment is not comparable to a single nuclear plant.
And realizing ten times the current building capacity for nuclear plants with the same (or stricter) regulation and standards? That is almost delusionally optimistic.
Yes, it's actually pretty common. See comparisons across generating technologies in "An international comparative assessment of construction cost overruns for electricity infrastructure" [1].
Here's what the researchers found for solar (section 3.4):
Thirty-nine solar PV and CSP power plants, representing 2374 MW of installed capacity and $16.5 billion worth of investment, were analyzed. (These are utility-scale infrastructure projects, thus they do not include the familiar rooftop solar collectors on buildings or residential configurations.) These projects as a class actually came in $4.2 million less than budgeted, or $200,000 less than expected per project. These solar systems had the lowest
average cost escalation per reference class (1.3 percent), the least time overruns (an average of 2 months ahead of schedule), and the lowest standard deviation for amount of overruns and time overruns. They also had the largest total amount of cost underruns, with the entire class of projects costing $163.9 million less than budgeted, though some of this may be explained by dramatic reductions in cost over the past 4 years. As Table 5 indicates, only 3 facilities had overruns greater than $50 million and only 3 facilities had cost overruns greater than 30%, all of which were CSP facilities rather than large-scale solar PV apparatuses.
Here are a few solar projects that outperformed in recent years:
O'Brien solar farm in Wisconsin, completed in 2021 on time and under budget:
1) None of these are grid scale.
2) All of them are heavily subsidized.
The closest I see in that list is Mount Signal 3, which comes in at about 1/3 the capacity of a typical grid-scale generating station (1/6 if you account for the fact that it's producing zero power half the time, on average). It also chews up nearly 2,000 acres of land.
Hillston is 120 megawatts. Sun Streams 2 is 200 megawatts. Mount Signal 3 is 328 megawatts. The coal fired generating plants that retired in the US in the past decade were often smaller than that.
The table above shows that the coal generators that retired between 2009 and 2011 had an average size of 59 megawatts (MW). By contrast, the average size of a coal-fired plant planned for retirement between 2012 and 2015 is 154 MW, more than twice the average size of the units retired during the 2009-2011 period.
In 2022, coal fired generators had a capacity factor of ~48% in the United States:
As a rough guide you can estimate that an American solar farm will generate about as much electricity annually as an American coal plant with half the nameplate capacity. Mount Signal 3 would roughly match a 164 megawatt coal fired generator for annual generation.
We were comparing nuclear and solar, not coal and solar.
164 megawatts (328 / 2, to account for the fact that solar plants are offline a minimum of half the time) is not anywhere in the same league as nuclear power plant, which are typically in the 2-3 gigawatt range, with modern large-scale plants producing 6-8 gigawatts.
The Mount Signal 3 plant also used up 2,000 acres (800 hectares of Imperial Valley farm land.
> And pretty much all nuclear projects are finished behind schedule and wayyy above budget.
All projects do, including wind and solar.
--- start quote ---
Ernst & Young (EY) has found that an average power and utility megaproject is delivered 35% over budget and two years behind schedule
Of the megaprojects surveyed, 64% were delayed and 57% were over budge. Almost three-quarters of hydropower, water, coal and nuclear infrastructure projects were over budget by 49% on average,
Nuclear power projects are not just over-budget, they start off with a budget of a couple of billions, whereas individual solar or wind power projects are way smaller and therefor carry less of a risk. Nuclear power requires a huge financial backing from a single entity (even it is "fed" by multiple sources). Almost always, the risk is carried by society, the profit, if any is gobbled up by some corporation.
There is no need to "overbuild" wind or solar. There has never been any illusion those sources will produce at 100% capacity all the time. There will eventually be energy storage to level out the peaks, but most countries still have years to build up to the point where this is necessary.
And the reason why there were so few fatalities was because huge chunks of land have been evacuated every time and costly cleanup operations have been undertaken. The risk is not just lives lost, but rather the impact on those countries' economy.