German elections, with a little WTF? thrown in

Yeah, even more than expected. Junior partner in a grand coalition is not a thankful job.

Sounds like a good outcome, social democrats around Western Europe seem to have been weakened by the recession, whether in power or in opposition (looking at Sweden, Germany and the UK, I'm guessing/hoping the pattern holds for other countries as well ).

Do you think Germany will adopt a more sensible line on nuclear power as a result of this? And in that case, will it last for more than this term?

More sensible? So far the problem where to safely and permanently store nuclear waste has not been solved. At the same time the amount of waste is growing quickly. The decision to get rid of nuclear power is absolutely correct. The question is only with what it should be replaced.

I don't agree, nuclear is cheap and good baseline power which is hard to fully replace with intermittent sources. It also releases less CO2 per kWh than even wind power from a life-cycle perspective.

The safety concerns (and incidents) are blown out of proportion when it comes to nuclear power. Western plants really do have a lot of redundancy in their safety systems and are very tightly watched and regulated. For example, of German relevance, both incidents in the Krümmel nuclear plant have been classified as INES 0, that is to say deviations without any safety threat whatsoever.

Lastly, waste. I agree that it's a problem, but as I see it we already have it on our hands, so why not keep nuclear power for as long as it takes to find really good replacements and put the new waste at the same place as the old? In Sweden we have a designated storage site, a containment method and construction is under way. As a bonus the storage units can be brought up and opened again (with great effort) if commercially viable nuclear breeder technology becomes available, which means we'll have fuel for free and when it comes out of those reactors its required storage time has dropped about two orders of magnitude.


Maybe we should split this into a separate nuclear power thread if people want to pick up on the discussion, I'm game.

Gorath said:

The decision to get rid of nuclear power is absolutely correct. The question is only with what it should be replaced.

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Yes, exactly. But until a viable replacement is found our nuclear power plants should keep going. It was a totally dumb and short-sighted decision by the former government. "Well, let's just turn them off and worry about everything else later because umm... probably, well or maybe or umm... at least hopefully there'll be alternative sources of power production by the time the nuke plants have all been shut down and err.. if not we can always import power." Come on. That is plain retarded. That's like calling your heating contractor today and making an appointment in 2020 to have your heating removed from your home that year because of the possible effects of global warming by then.

Now, I totally agree that the decision to get rid of nuclear power plants is correct but only if and when a viable alternative has been found that can cover the loss of nuclear power by 100% at least (better yet 100%+ so we could export/sell our excess power to neighboring countries).
What should have been done is give the operating companies (of the nuke plants) an advance warning that a long term exit strategy is going to be developed. Then promise them big time incentives (tax relief etc.) for supporting the research of alternative power sources and redirect government subsidies from e.g. coal mining to research.
Then one day in the hopefully not too distant future when someone somewhere has found a way to replace nuclear energy, only THEN begin developing a concrete exit plan with individual operating periods for each plant (based on the age of the plant and the efficiency etc.) so that the transition is as smooth as it could possibly be.

This whole issue is a typical problem that is just not compatible with politics though. An election period in Germany lasts for four years so any political party will always just make short-term decisions/plans while the whole issue of an exit strategy requires super-careful planning and a lot of patience (years or possibly decades...).
Actually I think it would be best to establish a special committee made up of a majority of young, independent (yeah wishful thinking but as independent as possible) scientists and other members of the various interest groups. Then give the Bundestag (parliament) only a controlling/supervisory function. Politicians should just not be involved in the decision-making on an issue like that. The decision on the right point of time to drop nuclear power should be a purely technological and economical one (when it makes sense) and not a political one (when it helps a party to be re-elected).

As a market liberal I find CDU-FDP the best realistic outcome, but even a lefty government would have been better than a grand coalition. Day to day issues aside grand coalitions suck from a democratic point of view, as they pretty much kill the debate (and that is the big flaw of PJs beloved Finnish system that in practice is very similar to a permanent state of grand coalition).

Gorath said:

More sensible? So far the problem where to safely and permanently store nuclear waste has not been solved. At the same time the amount of waste is growing quickly. The decision to get rid of nuclear power is absolutely correct. The question is only with what it should be replaced.

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If all the electricity you used in your lifetime was produced by nuclear energy, the nuclear waste produced would fit in a beer can.

That's a problem of manageable proportions.

What's more, we don't need to solve the problem of permanently storing it now. We only need to solve the problem of storing it until we have solved the problem of permanently disposing of it.

We already have technologies to permanently dispose of nuclear waste -- e.g. in accelerator-driven subcritical nuclear reactors -- but we just haven't made them cost-effective yet.

Compared to the environmental costs of alternatives, nuclear power is pretty benign, and many of its problems are soluble. We need to get electricity from somewhere, and for the foreseeable future, nukes will have to be a part of the package.

PJ, once again I find myself totally agreeing with your soundly reasoned position!!