If France can find space, surely Germany can.
Comment on Solar modules now selling for less than €0.06/W in Europe
suzune@ani.social 19 hours agoBut Germany has no space for nuclear waste. They haven’t been able to bury the last batch for over 30 years. And the one that they buried most recently began to leak radioactivity into ground water.
And… why give Russia more military target opportunities?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Lumisal@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
If Finland could find space, Germany definitely can.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
Idk, Finland has a much lower population density vs Germany. France is something like 1/2 the population density, but they also have >50 reactors, so surely Germany can find room for a few…
wewbull@feddit.uk 17 hours ago
Finland with it’s vast swathes of frozen tundra.
Lumisal@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
We don’t have Frozen Tundras. This isn’t Alaska.
And it’s actually stored south not north.
Valmond@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
And Sweden.
elucubra@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
I’m not a rabid anti-nuclear, but there are somethings that are often left out of the pricing. One is the exorbitant price of storage of spent fuel although I seem to remember that there is some nuclear tech that can use nuclear waste as at least part of it’s fuel (Molten salt? Pebble? maybe an expert can chime in). There is also the human greed factor. Fukushima happened because they built the walls to the highest recorded tsunami in the area, to save on concrete. A lot of civil engineering projects have a 150% overprovision over the worst case calculations. Fukushima? just for the worst case recorded, moronic corporate greed. The human factor tends to be the biggest danger here.
suigenerix@lemmy.world 10 minutes ago
Another example that gets skimmed over our ignored is the massive cost of decommissioning a nuclear power plant. It typically ranges from $280 million to $2 billion, depending on the technology used. More complex plants can be up to $4 billion. And the process can take 15 to 30 years to complete.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
Those are less competitive, and salt reactor attempts have historically caused terminating corrosion problems. The SMR “promise” relies on switching extremely expensive/rare/dangerous plutonium level enriched fuel, that rely on traditional reactors for enrichment, for slightly lower capital costs.
Flatfire@lemmy.ca 17 hours ago
Not an expert, but molten salt reactors are correct. MSRs are especially useful as breeder reactors, since they can actually reinvigorate older, spent fuel using more common isotopes. Thorium in particular is useful here. Waste has also been largely reduced with the better efficiency of modern reactors.
Currently, Canada’s investing in a number of small modular reactors to improve power generation capacity without the need to establish entire new nuclear zones and helps take some of the stress off the aging CANDU reactors. These in particular take advantage of the spent fuel and thorium rather than the very expensive and hard to find Uranium more typically used. There’s been interest in these elsewhere too, but considering how little waste is produced by modern reactors, and the capacity for re-use, it feels pike a very good way to supplement additional wind and solar energy sources.