Germany pledges nuclear shutdown by 2022 Follow

Yay?

There's been 3 epic accidents in nuclear facilities over the last 10 years?

German engineering has always been a leader in many technologies. If any country can make green energy profitable, they can.

That doesn't necessarily mean it has to be nuclear fission, which is is what is causing all the problems. The US has been investigating fusion technologies, which are much cleaner. It's still nuclear energy, but a much better kind. No nuclear waste, no CO2 emissions, and a much better ROI over time (at least in theory... the NIF is just a proof-of-concept system that the US plans to license out.)

I believe there have been 3 level 5 or higher events in the last 40 years or so.

This sounds like a very short-sighted, knee-jerk reaction from the Germans to me. What happened in Japan is highly unlikely to happen in Germany - northern Europe is not a hotbed of earthquakes and tsunamis like Japan is. In short, they're going to cripple themselves - and as one of the strongest economies in a stricken EU, this does not bode well for the region. What I heard is that they're planning on some mass windfarms in the North Sea, but they don't have (nor will they any time soon) the infrastructure needed to take that power from the north coast to anywhere deeper inland. That, and buying power off of France's nuclear grid, which seems somewhat...hypocritical?

2050, if Sim City is to be believed.

Never, ever, ever say "good people" and "EA" in the same sentance. These are the same ******* that killed Westwood and Origin.

Once we have a working Fusion reactor, we just shove all the nuclear waste into it and make stuff we can fission. then we shove that back in the fission reactor and make stuff we can fusion.

Seriously though, the main issue with nuclear waste is that we don't recycle or reprocess any of it. Because that process results in weapons grade materials. If we did reprocess all our nuclear waste, for one thing, the volume would be much, much smaller Right now anythign that might have possibly been in contact with a particle of radioactive material is classified as nuclear waste. Huge amounts of steel, insulation, lead, etc that aren't in their own right radioactive are put into nuclear storage because no one wants to take the time or effort to just isolate the actually radioactive parts. Other spent fuel rods that could be reprocessed into new fuel rods with only a 20%ish reduction in volume aren't.

Between that, and our outdated reactor designs in service, and we have issues. We already have working, proven designs for encapsulated pebble bed reactors that work just as well as the rod type reactors but also are impossible to melt down even without any functional coolant. Each of the pebbles is coated in a reaction limiting compound. You would literally have to break into the containment vessel, chip all the coating away from all the pebbles. stick them all back in a pile, then shut off the coolant to cause a melt down. They require less parts to operate, and when coupled with the same sort of cooling system we have on most of our reactors here (which is incidentally at least significantly more robust than the ones in japan were) the resulting reactor is literally orders of magnitude safer. And other than the U.S. navy, we haven't built any of them on a commercial scale.

nuclear energy and nuclear waste isn't the problem. it's our policies on how we play with them that are to blame.

Um, "several thousand years"?

Clean up will take around a decade max, and there will be an exclusion zone around the facility. Like in Chernobyl. It won't be any where near several thousand years of people living on top of radioactive material, though.

Old lady Merkel did this?

Conservatives hate nuclear power!

I knew this would happen. Nuclear power is very safe, but something happens that was caused by something completely unrelated to the inner workings of he power plant(earthquake), and suddenly everyone thinks it's going to kill us all.

I'm not saying they're not an issue, but the fact that there was a natural disaster involved will likely be ignored by the majority as they sit there and say that nuclear power is dangerous and should be stopped.

Having just returned from the German countryside, I can report that the amount of windmills and solar panels in the country make me feel slightly ashamed for us 'Mericans.

They also have way better beer. Srsly, we need to get on that.