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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 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.