Why are so many people opposed to nuclear energy?

[rtxoff]

Wind and water are too limited, and the latter is even an environmental problem sometimes. Solar cells are expensive and cause chemical polution, and obviously only work at day. It's not that simple.

Well Germans are doing exactly that, for some strange reasons it works for them so far.

edit: correction, to be fair whole Europe is doing it

Energiewende

Some text in english but not so prolonged like the German version

edit3: honestly to say it is not that simple is no argument at all

Edited June 7, 2014 by gpisic

[ZetaX]

Some ~25% are not everything, and there are the limits I mentioned. A power network is not as simple as seen in Sim City, where you just build enough power plants of whatever type you prefer.

[the_bT]

Well Germans are doing exactly that, for some strange reasons it works for them so far.

[...]

Except it is not really working all that great. I mean, there is still a chance but I won't bet money

At present nuclear energy is imported from France big time. That does solve the waste problem for Germany at least...

If you want to make renewables work you need very efficient power grid technology, development of which is slow and more importantly you need storage technology which is nowhere to be seen...

[rtxoff]

Some ~25% are not everything, and there are the limits I mentioned. A power network is not as simple as seen in Sim City, where you just build enough power plants of whatever type you prefer.

Well obviously the english text is missing plenty information. ~25% is the status right now and it is raising. Germans will shut down all they nuclear power plants in a few years. Eventually the will get to their goal to produce energy only by means of renewable energy sources. Even if they are not getting to 100%, at least they tried and at least a great amount will be.

And again that what you are saying is not an argument. To say something is not simple is even a confirmation that it is possible.

[rtxoff]

Except it is not really working all that great. I mean, there is still a chance but I won't bet money

At present nuclear energy is imported from France big time. That does solve the waste problem for Germany at least...

If you want to make renewables work you need very efficient power grid technology, development of which is slow and more importantly you need storage technology which is nowhere to be seen...

People are really really funny beeings. So because something is not really working all the great is a reason not to do it at all? Given the benefits it will create i think it is worth all the time at least to try.

The dependance on France will pass off, they got hit by diverse circumstances but nothing they can't handle. I have great confidence in the Germans.

When the world see's that the German finally did it i hope it will open their eyes. Until now i met only scepticism.

Looks like Germany and Europe will decide the fate of world's energy politics.

[Vonar]

Perhaps I have been reading too much Asimov, but nuclear energy seems to be a much better alternative to oil than wind power or solar power. Nuclear energy (particularly fusion) is very clean, (when done correctly) safe, and reliable. This being the case why are so many people opposed to nuclear energy, my best guess would be many from the cold war era are frightened by the very mentioning of... NUCLEAR! This seems very presumptuous and frankly an unfounded fear.

You know when a fair percentage of Europe, and a fair percentage of the Pacific Ocean are irradiated from just two nuclear accidents it is kind of easy to understand why people are fearful of nuclear power. Unfortunately nuclear power, wind, and solar are all insufficient for a truly green planet. Fusion power is the way forward and nothing not even the vaunted Tesla S series of vehicles has come even remotely close to equaling the power that you can find in a barrel of Oil.

[ZetaX]

That picture is one of the most stupid scare pictures out there. Find out the actual disage in relation to average.

[m4v]

Nuclear Fusion. Trying to solve the problems of today with technology that isn't real yet, that will work.

[the_bT]

People are really really funny beeings. So because something is not really working all the great is a reason not to do it at all? Given the benefits it will create i think it is worth all the time at least to try.

The dependance on France will pass off, they got hit by diverse circumstances but nothing they can't handle. I have great confidence in the Germans.

When the world see's that the German finally did it i hope it will open their eyes. Until now i met only scepticism.

Looks like Germany and Europe will decide the fate of world's energy politics.

I didn't mean to imply that the project was a mistake to begin with. But they way the Energiewende is currently managed is less then ideal and will most likely end in complete and spectacular failure. Probably promoting nuclear power use in the rest of the world. We will see how that turns out, for better or worse...

[ZetaX]

Well obviously the english text is missing plenty information. ~25% is the status right now and it is raising. Germans will shut down all they nuclear power plants in a few years. Eventually the will get to their goal to produce energy only by means of renewable energy sources. Even if they are not getting to 100%, at least they tried and at least a great amount will be.

I did not use the english text, and I never claimed it isn't rising. I actually am from germany, and I already read a lot into this topic a week ago, so I didn't even bother to read the article (again).

And again that what you are saying is not an argument. To say something is not simple is even a confirmation that it is possible.

To say that your claims are to simplistic is an argument: you need to give way more details until one can consider this to work. I am reminded of your stance on pyramids being built by some precursors, so I will repeat myself mostly: it is not my job to disprove your claims, but you have to give evidence to begin with. I don't see how you would run an energy grid with current technology and without anything that works independently from the weather/time/whatever. Yes, it is theoretically possible, but the costs for that are exorbitant as you would need absurd amounts of water reservoirs to store energy, or/and a lot more than the average need of energy in terms of solar/wind power plants. If some better technology comes along, then it might work; at the current state, 100% is just a dream.

[rtxoff]

Unfortunately nuclear power, wind, and solar are all insufficient for a truly green planet.

That is simply not true. Alone the sun is already sufficient. I mentioned this in some thread before already. An area much smaller the the Sahara could power the whole world and it is already taken into account that the sun is not shining 24 hours and also the Sahara is not at the equator and so on. Your argument is nonsense also the argument of centralized production is nonsense because you can have plenty smaller solar plants scattered around the world.

The only thing insufficient is the will of all you not believing it.

I have enough of this nonsense, just believe what you want just do not wonder if u wake up.

[ZetaX]

The power plant at the sahara does not suffice. It will simply not generate any energy at night. You would need such things to be distributed all over the earth. And you need to transport that energy, which causes lots of losses.

[guto8797]

To the original question, it is rather simple. Because some people want the common folk to hate nuclear.

Nuclear is cheaper, safer and overally a better power source than any other we have. Fossil Fuels pollute a whole lot and they are going to run out pretty soon. Renewables dont have a fraction of the efficiency required to be meaningfull. People who suggest we power the world with Solar are just Naive, we would need a massive improvement in efficiency.

Sure, nuclear has its drawbacks. But in almost 80 years you have heard about two accidents. Two. Chernobyl was in the USSR and there wasn't much in the safety department back then. Fukushima was hit by a earthquake and tsunami, and it had a water leak. Compare that to the amount of accidents in Fuel plants added to the constant pollution. Also as a side note, coal and fuel plants also actually produce radioactive waste.

The thing is. Fuel barons and etc dont want people to like Nuclear, it would ruin them. So, given most of them has a big chunk of control over media, they target the Opinion Cannon to Nuclear accidents. People hate nuclear because of accidents that were overhyped. Most of people panick at the sound of "Radiation", yet there are villages sitting 2 miles away from a radioactive coal ash surface pits.

What we really need is fusion. It would solve almost all of our problems. Then again media. There aren't even prototypes and yet people are already bashing at it.

Edited June 8, 2014 by KasperVld

[lajoswinkler]

Well the main Problem with nuclear Energy is the question what to do with the nuclear waste. I come from Germany and we have an ongoing discussion about this problem which is the main reason why most persons here are opposed to nuclear energy here. I know that all the dumb fears about exploding reactors are mostly irrational. And if there was a way to lock down the waste in some safe container and put it into an abandoned mineshaft I would really be fine with it. But all types of containers known so far won`t keep stable long enough. Metal does corrode, and plastic, cement and many other materials get unstable due to radiation over time. So maybe after some thousand or maybe just ten years radioactive material will get out and into the water. Then we will have huge problems.

Your government in Germany has been hacked by the "green" party which is composed out of dumbasses. They're ruining your energy economy just like it was done in Italy, to the joy of France, which then sells its energy, released mostly in their fission reactors.

The problem with high level waste is politically bloated and people are buying it because most of them are ignorant. Only a tiny part of the population knows the facts.

Final repositories are designed to be durable for the next several thousands years or more. They aren't regular dump facilities which will leak chemicals into the ground water.

But I'd like to ask you one simple question regarding the leakage after several thousands of years - why would anyone care? Don't you think we'd be more advanced by then, on the level of teraformers, so that few measly depositories would be a problem?

If we become extinct, again - why would anyone care? There'd be no intelligence left on Earth, and the leakage would be very slow, lasting for another few tens of thousands of years.

Really? Then have a look at this:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/fukushima_damage.jpg

http://www.abload.de/img/tschernobyl4xykt.jpg

And also have a look on that list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_fatalities_by_country

What? A hydrogen-exploded warehouse above the containment on a low shore and a power plant without containment run by commie imbeciles? Some examples you've got there... You should've mentioned Three Mile Island and Windscale instead.

Fission is the cleanest source per unit of energy extracted, and the least leathal one, again per unit of energy extracted. It is not clean. There are no clean sources. There are dirty and less dirty sources.

[ZetaX]

How has the government been "hacked" by a party that was not at power for the last nor this legislative period¿ Your post is just ideological nonsense. For example, as already linked, the total energy production has not changed, i.e. no more energy from france than before.

[Vaporized Steel]

I think the reason why the world is anti nuclear power because political propaganda made people feel wary about nuclear stuff in general. I'm mainly talking about the cold war propaganda that lasted for decades. That propaganda was mainly targeted at revealing how bad it was that the enemies side had all these bombs at their disposal that could wipe and destroy life and mankind in just a few waves of attack.

This propaganda was mainly active since the fifties untill the fall of the soviet Union.

So that's a whole generation been peppered about the darkside of nuclear power. It's very likely that if there wasn't a cold war we would have industrialized nuclear energy in many applications.

You can hypothesize that only 1 side of the major powers would have a full arsenal of nuclear material at their disposal while the other side would not and their would be no propaganda and people would use nuclear fission in a more progressive manner technologically/industrially speaking. Or simply we can hypothesize we just never had to face the problems of rivalry and international calamities.

Also I am for a green earth and I see the natural threatening dangers we humans pose on our planet. And I think nuclear energy is the most negligible form of pollution.

On the other hand I also think that most institutions and political changes for climate change that usually impose tax and excise are criminal just to drain your bank account and are not spend on what they tax collector promises to spend it on.

Reason is that the global energy corporations are still run by oil magnates. And I'm gobsmacked by my own confusion that these 'magnates' don't convert their domains of power into more revolutionary systems of energy management which I think could still profit them.

Possibly the reason is because rich powerfull man are usually not very smart.

[Vanamonde]

Please keep in mind that political discussions are not allowed on this forum, as they devolve into arguments and accusations. The practices of one government versus another falls under politics, as do opinions about Greenpeace, so folks will need to avoid those digressions or we will be forced to close the thread. Also, some of you seem pretty close to losing your tempers. Please take a step back and come down, or the result could be infractions and thread closure.

[Rondon]

Well obviously the english text is missing plenty information. ~25% is the status right now and it is raising. Germans will shut down all they nuclear power plants in a few years. Eventually the will get to their goal to produce energy only by means of renewable energy sources.

The goal is 60% by 2050, checked the comparison for wind and advanced nuclear and the prices approximately match but there's local variation, but seeing as wind is set to go down 25% by 2050 it doesn't seem a bad bet, but at the very least we shouldn't be shutting down nuclear power plants before there time is up. Germany has done this trying to remove there nuclear share down from 20% to zero, but because of this even despite the energiewende emissions have actually risen, because the primary fuel replacing nuclears role in the grid is coal, so electricity prices have risen dramatically essentially for nothing, for now. switching to renewable is a good idea but by also choosing to remove nuclear they've set themselves back, potentially for decades on what they could have achieved.

[Deathsoul097]

Perhaps I have been reading too much Asimov, but nuclear energy seems to be a much better alternative to oil than wind power or solar power. Nuclear energy (particularly fusion) is very clean, (when done correctly) safe, and reliable. This being the case why are so many people opposed to nuclear energy, my best guess would be many from the cold war era are frightened by the very mentioning of... NUCLEAR! This seems very presumptuous and frankly an unfounded fear.

Pretty much, yeah, "Nuclear" is a buzzword. The second people hear it they start running and screaming, thinking their faces are going to melt off and that the planet will be irradiated to hell. That, and the fact that people think a reactor is just a bomb in a facility that churns out power, and if someone flicks the wrong switch, then you have another Hiroshima, or Nagasaki. Which is of course, completely wrong. (It would take a lot of flicks of the wrong switches, coupled with incompetence, and basic human stupidity, along with a Homer Simpson styled mentality.) While I can understand the argument against N power through the waste perspective, if we were to manage to work with it more efficiently, and more cleverly, that argument would be null and void also. Fusion is cleaner, to the point that it just irradiates the reactor to hell, rather than leaving around mostly spent fuel rods.

[Elthy]

You all forgot 2 very important points:

1. Price

Nuclear Power is by far the most expensive power source, its cheap for the big companys because the big price comes in the future. Here in germany we have an experimental long term storage for nuclear waste called "Asse" which was considered safe when they build it. But not even 40 years later its unsafe and radiation is leaking in the groundwater, opposed to the million years it was supposed to last. The current estimated costs to get the stuff out there are 10 billion Euros, if it can be done at all.

Also after a shutdown of a nuclear powerplant you have to carefully disassemble it, since everything in there is somehow contaminated. Our electricity suppliers safed 30 billion Euros to disassemble our 16 reactors, but now they want our government to take over additional costs since that wont be enough by far.

Another costfactor that gets ignored are insurances for the worst case. Each powerplant in germany is insured with 2.5 billon Euros, but in case of a meltdown that wont even be enough to repair the reactor. Just imagine the economical damage if a bigger town gets contaminated, it would be over a trillion Euros. Noone can insure that so the electricity suppliers dont have to pay for such an insurance, otherwise the price per kWh would be much, much higher (some sources say over one Euro per kWh).

2. Uranium is limited. Since Uranium contains way more energy per gramm than every other source this offten gets ignored, but there isnt enough Uranium to power humanity for eternity (or even this century). Maybe it will be the same like oil, the point where none is left will be allways "in 30 years" but the prices will rise and at some point it will be clear that it cant go on like this. Thats the main reason why it should be totaly clear that nuclear can and will never be an option.

BTW: When germany decided in 2010 to extend the lifetime of nuclear powerplants (they decided to limit the lifetime in 2000) i began to research about that topic (especialy nuclear safety) and held a presentation about school. My final statement was "no matter what you do, there is allways a small risk left". Two weaks later, on a monday, i got my mark for the presentation, while we were watching the explosions of the reactor buildings in fukushima that happened in the last three days...

[ZetaX]

You are right on the base price being rather high if one factors in the massive hidden founding by the governments, especially storage costs. But the insurance costs are not that relevant actually. While the costs of a single incident are tremendous, they are dampened by the plants generally not being built very close to larger cities. If you factor in that other energy sources have similiar hidden costs, e.g. climate change or pollution, then it is not that frightening anymore. What actually constitutes a problem is that it is somewhat close to impossible to have an insurance for, as is a low risk, very high damage thing. No insurance company can probably stem that.

[rtxoff]

@Elthy you are absolutely right.

There is an strong pro Nuclear lobby but nobody of them mentions that N power is one of the most costly.

Nobody mentions that if we switch energy economy to N the uranium reserves won't even last enough for this century.

Every one of them is playing down the risks. And every one of them is not even considering other possibilities.

People which do automaticly are called green terrorists and such without delivering any facts that prove their claims.

Yes right now the prices for power have raised in Germany but that is something i am paying gladly if i know that i can do something for the enviroment.

[h=1]When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money[/h]

[Nibb31]

Yes right now the prices for power have raised in Germany but that is something i am paying gladly if i know that i can do something for the enviroment.

It's not just the prices that have raised in Germany. CO2 levels have too:

http://www.rtcc.org/2014/03/10/germanys-carbon-targets-in-doubt-as-emissions-rise-in-2013/

http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/09/germanys-140-billion-green-energy-plan-increased-co2-emissions/

Our biggest issue today is climate change, not nuclear waste storage. Germany's policy of switching from nuclear to coal is both suicidal in terms of CO2 output and hypocritical on nuclear, because it has increased electricity imports from France who has had to increase their nuclear output capacity.

Edited June 8, 2014 by Nibb31

[rtxoff]

It's not just the prices that have raised in Germany:

http://www.rtcc.org/2014/03/10/germanys-carbon-targets-in-doubt-as-emissions-rise-in-2013/

http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/09/germanys-140-billion-green-energy-plan-increased-co2-emissions/

Our biggest issue today is climate change, not nuclear waste storage. Germany's policy of switching from nuclear to coal is suicidal.

Coal is something you can produce from wood(closed CO2 cycle). Nothing bad about it.

[Elthy]

The problem with the rising CO2 is caused by something else:

In europe we have a carbon-license system. It means that companys have to get licenses per produced ton of CO2, these licences are given out by the government which also controlles the amount of licences per year (and reduces them). When a company produces to much CO2 it has to buy licences from other companys (which lowered theriy CO2 production) or it has to pay a fee. This would work great if there werent two factors:

1. The goverment gives out to much licences, which results in low prices for polution

2. In germany is a massive boom of renewable energy, partly caused by a government guaranted price for renewable energy and other boni. Those new sources dont produce CO2.

Now all those companys with renewable energy sources have licences spare, which they all want to sell what, in combination with way to much licences overall reduces in very low prices for CO2. So even the worst coal power plant can be run cheap, and it gets even cheaper the more other companys switch to renewable energy.

This is a gigant flaw in the system, but our current governmet doest want to admit this since they are responsible for this and politicans never admit a mistake...

Edit: And i forgot about some lands that want coal to stay an important energy source since they have the majority of the coal industry and want to keep their workplaces.