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Germany's oldest remaining nuclear reactor has been shut down, part of a move initiated four years ago to switch off all its nuclear plants by 2022.
Bavaria's environment ministry said Sunday that the Grafenrheinfeld reactor in the southern German state was taken offline as scheduled overnight, the news agency dpa reported. Grafenrheinfeld went into service in 1981. It's the first reactor to close since Germany switched off the oldest eight of its 17 nuclear reactors in 2011, just after Japan's Fukushima disaster. The next to close will be one of two reactors at the Gundremmingen plant in Bavaria, which is set to shut in late 2017. The rest will be closed by the end of 2022.
Germany aims to generate 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050.
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday June 29 2015, @06:52PM
I really can't endorse panic moving people from nuclear to fossil fuels. It's not an improvement. Not for health, not for safety, not for economy.
But at the same time, Germany has been making moderate strides in improving their usage of genuinely renewable energy. There's probably a whole world of nitty gritty economic planning that a stupid online hot take can't even begin to answer, but this action still reeks a bit of populism, rather than considered planning.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday June 29 2015, @07:29PM
I have to agree, but point out that considered planning is also lacking.
In this case of Fukishima, IIRC, there was a *sister* nuclear plant that *survived*. If anything, the populist position is based on a reasonable fear, just misplaced. It's not that nuclear science cannot be safe, and efficient. From what I understand the sister plant was built differently since the man in charge over there *refused* to build the sea wall so low to save money. He disagreed with the suits and went ahead to build it *right*. Had the sea wall at the 1st reactor been built the same way, they would've had power still, just like the 2nd. I don't think it's just luck that the 2nd survived, and the 1st didn't. It was *proper* execution of the considered planning in spite of management disapproval with the engineering requirements. How widespread is this tom foolery?
Unfortunately, nuclear may be our only real option to provide the power we need. Also unfortunately, it's become clear we can't trust them to be built or operated correctly due to motivations for profit.
Populism isn't completely off the mark here, but I sure wish it had a dedication to creating safer nuclear technologies. Unless we have monumental strides made in solar tech, and fabrication, the easiest way to produce power is natural gas while still remaining mostly clean. In the U.S, there are obviously huge questions regarding fraccing and the dangers of obtaining this "environmentally safe" fuel. We may be lucky to have the fraccing argument, since before the discoveries of the new shale, natural gas was well on its way to becoming a luxury in the U.S. They were discussing, and still pursuing the transport, of natural gas across the ocean in massive tankers. Probably kill anything within 10 miles from the shockwave alone when one of them blows up.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by wantkitteh on Monday June 29 2015, @09:43PM
Any tiny incident concerning nuclear power becomes high profile news around the world, giving a disproportionate view of the actual safety record and tiny amount of damage and death caused compared with fossil fuel burners. I was going to make a point about the coal power industry fiddling while the world burns, but that would require me to mention a particular solidly-proven environment effect that guarantees a backlash from morons who've been listening to other morons who are paid to spread bullshit, so I won't.
Oh... wait...
(Score: 1) by angelosphere on Monday June 29 2015, @09:57PM
The problem was not the sea wall.
I doubt there even was any.
The problem was that the emergency power generators where on ground level and not elevated or much better in a water tight compartment-
The sea wall wont help ... next big Tsunami is simple even higher ... what then?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30 2015, @01:18AM
The problem was not the sea wall.
Sure, in that it wasn't the only problem. But if the Fukushima plant had a sea wall about 5 meters higher, we wouldn't have even known the place existed. That makes the sea wall one of the problems.
The sea wall wont help ... next big Tsunami is simple even higher ... what then?
What's going to generate this higher tsunami? And how many centuries from now will it come?
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday June 29 2015, @07:52PM
I know Solar is supposed to be the new hotness, but are the panels actually a renewable source? Do they use any fairly uncommon ingredients? Will we run out of X ingredient that is necessary to make the solar panels efficient say in 100 years, 200 years, or 1000 years?
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday June 29 2015, @08:37PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_solar_cell [wikipedia.org]
Look out for a thin, wallpaper-like solar panel with lower efficiency but low cost sometime in the future.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ikanreed on Monday June 29 2015, @10:01PM
The elements themselves aren't going anywhere.
If you have a renewable energy surplus, then extraction(i.e. recycling) from retired cells isn't extraordinarily impossible.
The end question is "Can you build enough to handle current demand from currently economically accessible resources?" I believe the answer to be "Probably."
What's definitely true is that you don't want to be making the transition when you don't have cheap fuels to power the change-over. That's an economic transition that would suck for everyone alive. 80% by 2050 is a good goal.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30 2015, @01:28AM
What's definitely true is that you don't want to be making the transition when you don't have cheap fuels to power the change-over.
Expensive fuel does wonders for powering a change-over.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:18AM
Yeah, and the floor does wonders for stopping a free fall. So what is the point in parachutes?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 30 2015, @08:29PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 01 2015, @06:25PM
Perhaps because we don't have a spare planet to experiment on. Given the choice I'd rather pay for a parachute and not need it rather than just jump and hope for the best.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 02 2015, @04:32AM
Given the choice I'd rather pay for a parachute and not need it rather than just jump and hope for the best.
There's plenty of nebulous and imaginary dangers out there. I'd rather we work out an evidence and economics-based approach rather than a jump-at-shadows approach. I think it's time for triage - to work on the risks and problems that are most important to us. And frankly, climate change doesn't make the cut.