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Ten EU countries call on Brussels to label nuclear energy as green:
[...] Tapping into Europe's ongoing energy crunch, the countries make the case for nuclear energy as a "key affordable, stable and independent energy source" that could protect EU consumers from being "exposed to the volatility of prices".
The letter, which was initiated by France, has been sent to the Commission with the signature of nine other EU countries, most of which already count nuclear as part of their national energy mix: Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia and Romania.
Nuclear plants generate over 26% of the electricity produced in the European Union.
"The rise of energy prices have also shown how important is it to reduce our energy dependence on third countries as fast as possible," says the letter, as seen by Euronews.
Over 90% of the EU's natural gas come from foreign importers, with Russia as the main producer. This great dependency has been credited as one of the main factors behind the rise in energy prices.
"Supply tensions will be more and more frequent and we have no choice but to diversify our supply. We should pay attention not to increase our dependency on energy imports from outside Europe."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 16 2021, @04:28PM (7 children)
The nuclear power industry should be hiring bounty hunters. Just like computer hackers, they can while away the time, researching all the ways that nooklar can go wrong. Fukushima might have been prevented, as well as Chernobyl. In both cases, the finest minds in the industry made rather basic screwups. We need people looking at all those basics, to make sure we aren't building yet another disaster.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:13PM
were poisoned by economics. Corruption is the only real issue in nuclear energy, and every other shortage we suffer
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @06:14PM
Fukushima was an old GE 'export approved' reactor that was known to be unsafe even by 1960's standards, that was then left to rot by the very people who should have been maintaining it. Everybody involved, from initial design until the final stupidity, not only screwed up but did so knowingly and deliberately. With that as the baseline even the safest reactor is going to fail because the people in charge will make it fail to line their own pockets. This problem isn't limited to the nuclear industry, but the inevitable consequences of criminal mismanagement are more severe than other endeavours. I'm not saying that nuclear can't be done right, or that we don't need it, but that this is why we can't have nice things.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 16 2021, @07:20PM (1 child)
I live within the nuclear accident air-raid siren radius of a nuclear power plant. It was built directly on top of a fault line. It is also at an elevation where it would be inundated if there were a tsunami as large as the largest tsunamis in the fossil record for the area (which have occured regularly every few hundred years, and we are currently past due). I wouldn't be surprised if this poor location was cheaper than better alternative sites that were passed over.
Further south, a nuke plant recently went through upgrades, but they had immediate cooling system failures after the upgrades because they used the wrong tubing (no doubt trying to cheap out). The plant, shutdown instead of doing the work over again-- it had an approved extension for operation conditioned on the maintenance that the operators failed at.
It doesn't seem the folks building and maintaining nuke plants have the slightest fucking idea what they are doing, or else their level of greed is too great to trust them to safely build and operate nuke plants (at least in the US).
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday October 17 2021, @02:44PM
Move.
Move now.
Just sayin'. :}
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 17 2021, @05:07PM (2 children)
It's not hard to classify nuclear as green, though: while in normal operation, the only gas released into the atmosphere is water vapour, and a nuclear meltdown usually leads to large rewilding projects because humans abandon large areas of previously fertile land. So I fail to see under what condition nuclear energy contributes meaningfully to global climate change. Are you thinking of the concrete used in the construction of the facility?
Fukushima could obviously have been prevented with 20/20 hindsight, but so far we haven't invented 20/20 foresight. If you have, please list the large-scale disasters of the next ten years and your obvious solutions to prevent them from happening. Maybe we can solve world hunger too? Chernobyl could have been prevented by just keeping the damn humans off the controls, nothing more was needed.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 17 2021, @06:23PM
Fukushima could have been prevented using just plain old hindsight.
Japan's history with tsunamis is written in stone, for those who are capable of reading. No matter how the facts are spun, it was stupid to put a nuclear reactor in the flood plain. Far better to put the plant a mile further inland and/or fifty feet higher, and pay the costs for doing so.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 17 2021, @06:55PM
Also, read wikipedia - not one, but TWO tsunami studies were farted off and ignored. So, Tepco was being told, in no uncertain terms, that they were facing a disaster.
That, despite the fact that the study was historically valid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster#2000:_Tsunami_study_ignored [wikipedia.org]