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.
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.
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
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.
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, …
Well yes there is a very good argument against nuclear and that is that it replaces solar energy.
solar energy might have been expensive in the past but now it’s the cheapest form of energy in history. we needed an absence of nuclear in the past to have a motivation to develop green, safe, efficient energy. and solar is the best way to do that.
i also ask you to consider the future. solar energy gets cheaper the more is deployed of it, so it will get even cheaper in the future. we have seen enormous price drops for transistors (computers) in the past, and solar panels are semiconductors, just like transistors are semiconductors. who says that we wouldn’t also see similar price drops for solar energy in the future? maybe solar panels will be cheap as paper in the future.
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.
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.
As for coal, it’s even more expensive when it kills off the planet.
No doubt but we have other viable options.
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
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/