“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity.”
APR 27, 2024
LLAW’s NUCLEAR ISSUES & COMMENTS, Saturday, (04/27/2024)
A huge lesson could and should be learned by the rest of us from Germany’s decision to do away with nuclear energy entirely. The graph in the abbreviated story below tells it all. Of course our major problem is weaning ourselves from carbon-based fossil fuels because of corporate greed and the associated cost of doing away with long-ago amortized and paid for buildings, facilities, equipment and the related infrastructure of drilling and mining.
It has nothing to do do with our need for anything related to nuclear power, its unnecessary growth, nor its tiny affect on CO2’s global warming and climate change. America, you are being lied to by our government and the propaganda of the industry which should have long ago been dead and buried. ~llaw
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Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back
The past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide.
TREVELYAN WING, THE CONVERSATION – 4/27/2024, 4:27 AM
Nuclear remains unpopular
National polls underscore the Teutonic aversion to nuclear. Even in 2022, at the height of the recent energy crisis, a survey found that 52 percent opposed constructing new reactors, though 78 percent supported a temporary extension of existing plants until summer 2023. The three-way Social Democratic-Green-Liberal coalition government ultimately compromised on mid-April 2023.
Today, 51.6 percent of Germans believe this was premature. However, a further deferral was deemed politically unfeasible given the trenchant anti-nuclearism of the Greens and sizeable cross sections of the population.
Despite some public protestations to the contrary (the main opposition CDU party declared in January that Germany “cannot do without the nuclear power option at present”), in private, few political leaders think the country will, or even realistically can, reverse course.
As an industry insider told me, talk of reintroducing nuclear to Germany is “delusional” because investors were “burnt … too many times” in the past and now “would rather put their money into safer investments.” Moreover, “it would take decades to build new [nuclear] power stations” and electricity is no longer the sector of concern, given the rapid buildout of renewables, with attention having shifted to heating and transport.
Predictions that the nuclear exit would leave Germany forced to use more coal and facing rising prices and supply problems, meanwhile, have not transpired. In March 2023—the month before the phaseout—the distribution of German electricity generation was 53 percent renewable, 25 percent coal, 17 percent gas, and 5 percent nuclear. In March 2024, it was 60 percent renewable, 24 percent coal, and 16 percent gas.
Overall, the past year has seen record renewable power production nationwide, a 60-year low in coal use, sizeable emissions cuts, and decreasing energy prices.
The country’s energy sector, it seems, has already moved on. In the words of one industry observer: “Once you switch off these nuclear power stations, they’re out.” And there’s no easy way back.
For better or worse, this technology—in its present form at least—is dead in the water here. For many Germans, it will not be missed.
Trevelyan Wing, Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Geopolitics and Centre Researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG), University of Cambridge. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, Saturday, (04/27/2024)
All Things Nuclear
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Why Germany ditched nuclear before coal—and why it won’t go back | Ars Technica
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Ukraine-Russia war latest: ‘Putin did not order Navalny death,’ – US report – Sky News
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… threats that such support would increase the risk of nuclear war. … threat to European security since the end of the Cold War. “As we’ve told China …
38 Years after Chernobyl: Ukraine remains vulnerable to nuclear threats – Freedom
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38 Years after Chernobyl: Ukraine remains vulnerable to nuclear threats … attack on Ukraine’s nuclear energy infrastructure. … For two years now, the …
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Hydrothermal deposits record climate changes in Yellowstone – The Missoulian
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