The one that really breaks my heart is the SNR-300, a cutting-edge liquid metal sodium-cooled breeder reactor capable of unlocking the full potential of the majority isotope (U-238) rather than just the minority (U-235), giving us literally billions of years of current-day whole-earth power from known uranium resources (including seawater and erosion). It was 100% completed and ready to come up to power, but then Chernobyl happened and the people (of Germany) revolted. It is now an amusement park.
Another related timing coincidence is that a smaller sodium-cooled reactor in the USA (the EBR-2) demonstrated completely passive shutdown in loss of flow and loss of heat sink accidents without any control rods going in just 2 weeks before Chernobyl happened. Of course today almost no one has heard of it.
I grew up close to Kalkar and visited the theme park that is now located at the power plant a few times as a kid.
If you read the timeline, you can see that the protests started before the Chernobyl disaster. At that point, no government entity wanted the reactor to go online.
Some of my family members went to protest there when they were younger. Our physics teachers discussed the plant with us on several occasions as part of the mandatory curriculum. I can just say, Germany's relationship to nuclear is and was always characterized by strange concerns about environmental issues and a drive just to oppose something for vague political associations. It's hard to describe, but feels very similar to virtue signaling.
I can confirm that the protests were already hot before 1986. Chernobyl was just the final nail in the coffin. But this is often forgotten.
Another thing that is often forgotten and at least partially contributed to the outcome of Kalkar never going online, is a substantial change in the political climate regarding the question of nuclear proliferation.
It might seem strange now, but 40 years after WW II Germany was probably closer to getting its own nuclear inventory than today. While it was far from uncontroversial at the time it was not a heretic idea either and widely discussed.
A fast breeder like Kalkar would have been an important step in that direction, as would have been the heavy-water reactor in Niederaichbach, which only ran for about a year.
To complete the nuclear fuel cycle and to produce the plutonium for Kalkar a reprocessing plant would have been necessary which again had enabled Germany to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. The planned and partially completed facilities in Wackersdorf were abandoned in the 80s too.
People from the anglosphere often seem to think that Russian and now Qatari gas is a replacement for the nuclear power, which is rather wrong: The vast majority of Germany's natural gas usage is residential for heating and in industry.
Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project.
> Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project
The best time to start a multi-decade infrastructure project was multiple decades ago. The second best time is now.
Boilers need replacing anyways, so this could have been very gracefully over time.
I have no doubt that the German public is full of true believers. That does not exclude Soviet/Russian influence. I don’t have any solid evidence but the Soviets/Russians had several motives, means and opportunities to spread anti-nuclear influence.
Not only would a (West) Germany with abundant cheap nuclear power have energy to compete industrially, they would have the ability to enrich plutonium which might lead to the development of a home-grown nuclear strike capacity within a short range from Moscow. That is, assuming such an idea was politically possible.
All energy is fungible. Certainly the cost of switching is not free, but the time to begin doing that was decades ago.
Russians and companies interested in perpetuating the dependency on fossil fuels.
E.g. Greenpeace Germany had weirdly close links to Gazprom, and was even at one point selling natural gas as "green" and "renewable". Greenpeace Belgium was lobbying for the closing of nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas ones. I find it hard to believe that even Greenpeace could be that blind without external help.
I think the timeline matters here. While the effect of CO2 emission on global warming are known (to some extent) for more than a century already, in the eighties and early nineties, it was not a chief concern of the general populace in Europe, while the (perceived or actual) dangers of nuclear energy certainly was.
I went to primary school (1-4 grade) in the mid 1990s in a small post-communist country. Fossil fuel burning producing emissions bad for your health and harming the planet was something that was a part of the curriculum in like the second or third grade (I remember it vividly because the teacher asked why are trolleybuses better than bused, I was sure it was something to do with the engine, but didn't want to risk embarrassing myself; I was right, and I told myself I should be more confident in myself).
If it managed to get into the curriculum of a small post-communist country in the mid-1990s, "green" organisations should have been aware of the impacts of emissions and CO2. And for what it's worth, Greenpeace up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine made it infeasible, was pushing for closing of actively running and already amortised nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas.
It's hilariously ironic how one of the most iconic green movements actually ended up causing more damage to the planet on the planetary scale than helping. Sucks for us all that have to live with it though, just because a bunch of blind idiots couldn't be bothered to think.
I don't know how much gas they actually sold at the time, but some major oil/gas pipelines were built during the 1960s, 1970s and early 80s. So the intention was clearly there.
That's interesting. Even if the volume was low, perhaps the Russians were nevertheless interested in sowing dissent in the German public opinion. In particular, making sure the energy sector is always dependent on some foreign source.
That plus well developed civilian nuclear power gives the means to developing atomic bombs, and Russia has every reason to fear a nuclear-armed Germany
I doubt that this was a major concern as US nuclear weapons have been stationed in Germany since 1960. They remain under US control but the German army is trained to use them in the event of a war. And of course Soviet nuclear weapons used to be stationed in East Germany during the cold war. So for practical purposes Germany was already nuclear-armed.
But who knows. This was 15 years after the end of WW2. It wouldn't be too surprising if there had been lingering fears in Russia about what Germany might be up to outside of NATO.
Probably didn't help that for much of the cold war Germany was a likely candidate for "ground zero" of a nuclear exchange. I think living under that might reasonably influence people's attitudes.
Conflation between weapons and generators was weird then - and it is fossil idiocy at this point. There was a grain of truth at the time when all civilian nuclear programs were the flipside of military programs, but even then the imagery of mushroom clouds over power plants was either ignorant or dishonest.
Yes, I agree, I think a large part of it came from people not understanding the physics.
Even in my physics class in high school, when we spoke about the reactor in Kalkar and watched several documentaries about Chernobyl, our teachers made it seem like explosions from nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons would be the same in yield. Which is an outright lie, given a nuclear reactor usually explodes from a steam or hydrogen explosion.
To me, the opinion about nuclear power kind of feels like the subject of homeopathy in Germany.
It feels like in the general population there is a whole that can only be filled by non-science and quackery.
The most reasonable people that usually believe in science just get emotional and ignore facts in favor of a vague feeling of defending their beliefs no matter what.
Yes, indeed. But there are still parts of Germany where you should not pick wild mushrooms because of Chernobyl. And the whole Asse II we still have to fix.
I recall people talk about that in Sweden too. There did however seems to be a bit confusion around since copper, silver and iron mining tend to release a lot of radioactive radon dust in a fairly large area. The recommendation to be careful with wild mushrooms or wild meat never made a distinction between the two sources.
If I remember correctly that was a result how the fallout was transported via the jetstream - and if it did rain, hence a rather non-uniform distribution. The first fallout cloud went from Ukraine over Poland to Scandinavia but it did not rain down. A second cloud went westwards over then Czechoslovakia and then southern Germany, hence the impact. The German Agency for Radation Protection has this map of Caesium ground contamination in 1986:
The mushroom thing is because of bioaccumulation: Mushrooms seem to ingest the particles from its surrounding ground/ground water, hence a higher concentration of radioactive material in a smaller volume. And then wild boars eat those mushrooms, concentrating it even further. Caesium 137 has a rather short half life of only 30 years, but through the process of accumulation/concentration still today meat from wild boars shot in that region gets tested and is often over the allowable limit to eat.
In Bavaria testing of venison is mandatory and consumers have the right to see the measurement protocol for every piece of sold meat.
Because the contamination varies greatly, depending on where it rained during a short timespan in 1986, the amount of usable meat also varies, but is usually between 50% and 70%. The rest, which is not safe to eat is bought by the state.[1]
People are always quick to call Germans crazy because of their attitude towards nuclear energy, but Chernobyl had real world implications to our daily lives and to a degree still has to this day.
Hmm, Kalkar, the only nuclear power plant I ever protested - in the late 70s when I was still in school and construction had just begun. It was finished in 85 but never even fueled due to safety concerns (liquid natrium is nasty, state government did not authorize operation), protests and significant doubts about its purpose (breeders are most suitable to produce bomb material and nuclear fuel).
Chernobyl happened 1986 and probably put the last nail in the coffin, when its radioactive material spilled over Germany and people were recommended to stop eating mushrooms, game animals and homegrown salad. I was doing my nuclear physics practical at the Uni at the time and our lab offered food measurements as a public service, so people brought their homegrown vegetables, fruits and milk. Highest measurements were always the grass in front of the institute though. Much higher than in the "neutron lab" I was working in at the time.
1991 Kalkar was finally officially abandoned and later sold to a private investor.
There is also Angra III in Brasil which has a similar history but with completely different outcome. The plant was bought from Germany in 1985 and then stored for a quarter of a century. Some parts were kept in nitrogen to prevent corrosion.
But contrary to Zwentendorf and Kalkar the project was rebooted (in several attempts) and is currently scheduled to be finished in 2028.
The early nuclear power plants were all individually designed and custom built, before commercial power plants were standardized. The German standard plants are called Konvoi and the individual builds Pre-Konvoi.
Currently Angra II is the only Pre-Konvoi plant still in operation in the whole world. If Angra III goes online, it will be a quarter of a century after the last Pre-Konvoi plant (Angra II) and more than half a century after all the others.
In Finland where I'm from the Olkiluoto III nuclear plant was delayed multiple times and ended up being 9th most expensive building in the world (excluding military bases which we don't have public records):
I'm highly skeptical of the schedules and since it's so old equipment I would be very surprised if it will be in budget and start when scheduled. Anyway I hope it works out.
It is a good job the station's Finnish owner/operator, TVO, got it on a fixed price contract. That does not make coping with the delays in coming online any easier, but some consolation that someone else is footing the construction bill and enriching the local economy.
This is, to some extent, the same as Hinkley Point C where EDF and CGN have got a long term strike price. I wait with interest to see how Sizewell C will be financed, be it the regulated asset base model or else a Contract For Difference.
There is a good argument for cost-plus construction contracts provided the purchaser can financially cope with the risks. Risk transfer is never free!
EDF has only recently become fully state owned. Also the French state have recently amended the ARENH arrangement to get greater revenues (who knew selling options for 42 EUR/MWh was a bad idea). Greater losses and damages have been incurred by previous governments.
> giving us literally billions of years of current-day whole-earth power from known uranium resources (including seawater and erosion)
It's not like it was a one-time chance that we missed, and we'll never get back. The technology still exists, it is even in production. Russia has 2 reactors running as of now, BN-600 and BN-800. The first has been running for more than 4 decades, the other for 8 years. A BN-1200 design has been recently approved for construction, and Russia plans to make many of them.
In the US, there's the Terrapower company that has started the approval process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its sodium-cooled reactor, Natrium [2]. These things take years, but my guess is that in the worst case scenario, they'll still be able to build a reactor by 2040.
It's a great place to sleep in for EDM festivals like Parookaville. And the nuclear reactor aesthetic certainly goes well with steampunk stage decoration.
I believe the real reason that reactors like this never took off is that the US government pushed hard against them due to "proliferation concerns". Which may or may not have been a cover story for saving the fossil fuels industry.
If we have invested the same amount of money to make reliable, safe nuclear power plants that take up fraction of the space "rewnewables" use the world would be a better place.
Btw. there is nothing really renewable in solar planels and wind mills.
"When wind turbine blades reach the end of their 20-to-25-year service lives, they usually end up in landfills."
Hazardous waste testing on solar panels in the marketplace has indicated that different varieties of solar panels have different metals present in the semiconductor and solder. Some of these metals, like lead and cadmium, are harmful to human health and the environment at high levels. If these metals are present in high enough quantities in the solar panels, solar panel waste could be a hazardous waste under RCRA. Some solar panels are considered hazardous waste, and some are not, even within the same model and manufacturer. Homeowners with solar panels on their houses should contact their state/local recycling agencies for more information on disposal/recycling."
Not entirely disagreeing with your key point, but that's not what "renewable" means to me.
Renewable is about fuel, not generator.
If gas station turbine is compared to solar panel and windmill blade, then natural gas and underground oil are compared to sunlight and wind.
Underground oil and gas are limited resources baked many many millions of years ago, pretty much over similar timescales.
Wind and sunlight,for the purpose of this discussion, are self renewing - we will not run out of them.
Your discussion is more on how ecological the actual generators are, and that's a fair discussion to have, but comparison is not a wind mill blade and a car, it's windmill blade and solar panel to nuclear reactors and gas power plants.
Solar panels are highly recyclable after their extremely long life. Certainly no worse than oil, even if left alone (which won't happen, sincethey contain valuable materials).
Turbine blades are mostly fiberglass, which is about as neutral of a material as you can get. They are buried in a landfill (worstcase) after producing tremendous amounts of energy. New designs are lasting longer and being made recyclable, since so many people have this sticking point (even though no fuel oil is recyclable)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300
Another related timing coincidence is that a smaller sodium-cooled reactor in the USA (the EBR-2) demonstrated completely passive shutdown in loss of flow and loss of heat sink accidents without any control rods going in just 2 weeks before Chernobyl happened. Of course today almost no one has heard of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...