The petition to stop closing German nuclear power plants needs 5750 more votes to reach quorum, with 2 days left to go.

2 comments

1. I think they’ll get there easily

2. Good. Shut em down 🙂

   Progress of renewable energy from wind, solar, hydro and therm have not only show leaps and bounds of progress in efficiency, but also cost and scalability.

   Add to this that solar is easily deployed on existing buildings and there hook into existing infrastructure. On top of that there are battery setups, both industrial and private scale that can help distribute power in case high grid usage, as well consume to store during low grid usage.

   Then there are the electric vehicles with large battery packs to consider that can do the same as at home battery packs. The quantity of those is ever increasing. Especially with bans on new internal combustion vehicles in more places across the globe starting in about 10 years.

   And those were just some positive things about renewables.

   About nuclear. It’s expensive to setup in both lead time until the first GWh leaves the plant. This measured in time for legislation, building a plant, mining and refining ore for usage.

   Then you get the plant itself needing staffing, high maintenance and high regulation (which time has proven is often ignored by political choice at the ignorance of engineering advice).

   After its lifespan there is the tear down to consider, where the plant needs to be spooled down, waste needs to be removed and the plant itself needs to be destroyed. It being nuclear, that’s a challenge of its own.

   Obviously all this produces nuclear waste that needs to go somewhere, either reused somehow or stored to infinity.

   Lastly, since February we have all seen a clear example that you simply cannot count on anything when it comes to war and not blowing up nuclear stuff. So nuclear plants are also fabulous ways of holding a political hand around a big area’s throat, that may not affect only the country the plant is in.

   Then there are environmental considerations, that also get ignored, such as fault lines. Just look at Fukushima.

   So yea. In this day and age of advancement in all technologies that can deliver power and are not nuclear, there is clearly no need to add more nuclear plants. Energy should instead be invested into making current nuclear plants obsolete, best done by focusing on the technologies for energy storage, so that during peaks we need no longer rely on bigger plants, nuclear or otherwise.