You tried your best at being unbiased, thanks. Look forward to the next one and an in depth look at what we know about of the Baraka power plant in the UAE. Can we trust the figures. Is it comparable? Obviously you will bring up Nuscale.
I dont need to see the whole video to know the reason. Stunningly because one would expect better from the Germans, nuclear power was shut off in Germany because they were all kinds of massive stupid.
One important note regarding aging nuclear reactors. Before a nuclear reactor start operating the power plant has to get a license from the country's nuclear regulatory authority to operate it for a fixed number of years, let's say 20 years. Before this license expires the plant has to make a choice to renew the license or decommission the reactor. If they choose the former option they have to prove to the regulators that the reactor can safely operate for the next period, let's say another 20 years, which includes upgrading control and safety systems, replacing aging equipment, doing extensive inspections on critical components, etc. Just because a reactor is 40+ years it doesn't mean it only conforms to safety standards from 40 years ago.
The french reactors were checked by the EU. They were rated among the worst in europe and important stuff wasn't even checked because of pressure by the french government. That is why I don't want any nuclear power in Germany. We would have to spend billions, it is just too expensive.
We shouldn't have rolling safety regulations. 1970s western nuclear power stations are already the safest form of energy on earth. More safety regulations just serve to increase costs and prevent the uptake of nuclear energy, increasing net harm.
Hi there - French-trained nuclear engineering graduate here. A great, balanced video as always. There was one detail that I think needs clarifying though. The cracking did not happen because the reactors were old. In fact, it happened in the younger, “N4” type reactors. In the case of the Penly-1 reactor (the one in which the crack you mentioned happened) the previous welds done beside the crack were likely improperly heat treated when done, leading to internal stress in the pipe, causing the crack. So case of bad workmanship and/or lack of quality control rather than ageing.
@@milo8425 yea.. that is not really compavle. One side quite a few people died and 4000 acers of land made useless for multiplel decades. The other hand, 0 people died and 2% of the ejaculated land remain useless 10 years later.
Out of curiosity, what is your salary? My mates a nuclear engineer on Royal Navy submarines and the salaries in the forces are pathetic. Interested to know what similar jobs pay in this field
@@milo8425 we can fuking spot radioactive fishswarms per satilet to this friggin day.....just becasue most of the shit ended in the sea instead over land doesnt make it one friggin bit less damaging....clown comment...
Small comment on the crack from a french welding engineer : it's not thermal fatigue, it's stress induced corrosion. It's a much more complicated topic ! But as someone that worked on the repairs, I can say that it's well under control, and just the fact that it was detected before being critical, it shows that the safety procedures are working
Good for France. Hope that you country is staying on top of repairs. Here in Japan about 20 years ago at a nuclear power plant in the west, a pipe burst scalding to death a worker. Has to be one of the most horrific ways to die. Keep safe.
That's a misunderstanding... that it was caught shows that a small part of the safety procedures are working. You don't know what you haven't caught, or isn't covered in the safety procedures because it is completely unknown, or ignored or neglected.
@@Andreas-gh6is yes and no. Stress induced corrosion was not something that was suspected as "possible" here. It's because of a weird superposition of "coincidences" that it happened. But the procedures aren't necessarily about finding the causes. They analysed every possible failure mode, and put in places controls to make sure that it wouldn't happen. For instance, here the failure mode is a rupture of the pipe. The procedure calls for visual, surface and volumetric controls to make sure the risk of the failure happening is minimal. You can't plan for everything, yes. But you can think of all that could go wrong and prepare for this. And without this, the french nuclear authority would never have accepted the operation of nuclear reactors. Those guys are extremely strict, and not someone you're playing with. They, by the way, have congratulated EDF for their response to this issue, and the "safety procedure are working" is le paraphrasing some of their conclusions Th
Although I'm a pro-nuclear guy, and with all due respect toward you and your work Informattricks... I really hate it when people involved claim "it actually proves safety procedures are working" in that case. It's only partially true. It's mostly true, in my opinion. Still, it so close to be a lie, I would never let anyone say that. First, it's a bare minimum for safety procedure to inspect and therefore detect unexpected failures. Claiming "see, it works" is VERY concerning, because we have MANY other examples where similar incidents weren't correctly addressed. They actually were kept so secret they in the end WEREN'T handled, or not correctly. People know that. They know the phrase to be a lie. Therefore, repeating the phrase which was a lie, in a context were it's only partially true, very wrong message. Second, that particular failure is very serious! Yes, it's under control. But it still shouldn't have happened. Why did it happened? Many reasons, the loss of know-how being one of them, and probably the main. The answer is "need more money, more investment, in short, more nuclear" is probably the correct answer, but still very unsatisfying. Another big reason is... that safety procedures did NOT work until they did. Hence back to point one. France is NOT exemplary. Yes, we had no Chernobyl, no Three mile Island, no Fukushima in France. It's not simply "luck", it's indeed because of quality work and choices. But Russians, Americans and Japanese aren't poor workers and unwise people. They are like us. People. The very reasons why these major incidents occurred, we find them in France too. And despite the changes in regulation, despite the adaptation... we still find them. Fission nuclear energy at his very core will ALWAYS be extremely nasty. That is a very efficient industry and very necessary one nowadays, but we shall always work with the idea in mind on "how to replace it. How to make sure we do not need that terrible thing anymore". Like I said, I am a pro-nuclear guy. Thus to my opinion, yes, definitely, we need to build more reactors, we need to invest more in this energy, we need to train more people. But more importantly, we need to talk about every issue and answer every critics. For god sake, we have to stop over simplifying the problem.
To an extent yes, but overall nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to construct, run, and especially destruct. Nobody needs them for anything, with wind and solar being there for almost no money. In Germany, with German weather conditions, NPP kwh costs 6-8ct (until shutdown), solar 4ct, wind 2ct. NPPs are useless, extremely dangerous and expensive monuments of the past.
"The reactor... has a cost of 8 million dollars per megawatt. While windturbines cost 1 to 2 million dollars per megawatt." That is not a fair comparison. Nuclear can generate baseload since it is a dependable energy source. Wind is not. You need to add the cost for massive capacity battery storage to wind power before it can potentially fill the role of base load power generation. Same with solar. When you add battery cost, the price goes up sharply. If the tech is even already available for the capacity on the scale of a nuclear reactor.
Also worth factoring in the land / transmission costs. Wind farms apparently need 300+ times the land area to generate the same amount of energy…and that is going to be so spaced out you’d need to invest in more transmission infrastructure
People are building water resovores to act as batteries and are cheaper and more long term and way safer. I think we just need a bit more motivation and with diversity will not need most dams or nuclear power plants except for nuclear weapons tritium has a short half life and cannot be made without nuclear power plants in any decent amounts.
When I read the title of the video, my first though was because Germany has massive coal deposits and the coal companies lobbied against nuclear energy. I wouldn't be surprised if the green party was started by the coal company.
Air pollution, acid rain, and burning coal releases heavy toxic & radiative metals and isotopes as NORM naturally occurring radioactive minerals // that ends up as metal oxides or fly ash that blows around everywhere like a continual Chernobyl accident // Coal is a toxic disaster and its best case is with clean coal gasification used as purified chemical feedstock to make methanol, DME, synthetic gasoline, diesel and jet fuels, lubricants and other petrochemical hydrocarbon and carbon molecules used widely in many industries. The heavy, toxic, radioactive and valuable metals present in tiny parts of the coal, can be recovered and commercialized to create additional profits and revenue to the clean gasification industrialized coal chemical feedstock creation. Nuclear the safest and cleanest way to make negative carbon electricity, but not the cheapest, though other renewables cost more when energy storage added for 24/7 caseload uptime for Wind and Solar, since the storage capacity of energy storage needed to stabilize such sources costs more than over budget nuclear reactors.
Despite the fact the that the burning of coal produces 1,000x more nuclear fallout. The coal that's burnt isn't pure carbon, it's laced with a multitude of impurities, traces of nuclear isotopes and poisonous heavy metals are spewn in the air around coal plants.
@@TheNikoNik Trees and plants NEED CO2, if they stopped cutting every bloody tree they see in the Amazon, there would not be any issues, all this climate BS drives me nuts. I am in my late 60s and still remember all the articles in the 70s from the media that we were facing a new ice age, more BS that was all lies, certain individuals are making billions out of this climate change BS and as usual the stupid public listen to them rather than do research to see who the bad actors are making a fortune, and yes most politicians from various countries have their finger in the pie as it were. Even if Europe stopped ALL use of carbon fuels it would make no difference, the biggest players in pollution are China America and India.
People tend to forget that Germany is one of the safest countries for nuclear Powerplants. No majpr environmental Problems (like Tsunamis). One of the highest Safety standarts in the world,... it just doesnt make sense for the "green" Party to shut the worlds most advanced nuclear Reactors while, 3km behind the French border, there is one of the oldest Nuclear plants in the World (Tihange) for ex.
The green just use this as a vehicle to create artificial scarcity, which makes an argument for rationing. It's barely about the climate, it's mostly about redistribution. I mean, they're not just burning coal, they're burning _lignite_ which apart from more CO2 per Watt energy produced, also gives off more nano particulate dust and other nasties than coal.
@@rey_nemaattori no scarcity, energy production with lignite is going down even after leaving nuclear power and the final decision leaving nuclear power was made with the conservative CDU/CSU leading the government. Actually, you got everything wrong, sorry.
@@Yulo2000Leyje I do not think you realize how little waste is actually produced. It is not much. I highly recommend this guy, a energy professor. Ill even time stamp where he talks about how much is produced. /c1QmB5bW_WQ?t=1517
@@beanapprentice1687 Depends on if you mean just the fuel pellets themselves or all the equipment, uniforms, PPE, etc that gets contaminated and has to be disposed of as well. Combine all that with the containment and protective shielding so it doesn't seep into groundwater for a long period of time, and it adds up. There are theoretical plans of how to store it long-term, making tunnels underground that can then be backfilled and compartmentalized on the way out, for example. But getting approval and then building it is probably a long way out yet. Dumping at sea is a less legal option due to treaties not to do it anymore, despite it being the easiest, most cost-effective, and somewhat "safest" method (ocean floor is 3 miles down and it would be roughly concentrated in the dumping area, but there's still ocean life there as well as whatever drift you have from the currents).
The worst part here is that Three Mile could hardly even be considered a disaster. A disaster in PR maybe, but nowhere near a nuclear disaster, yet had such a massive impact nonetheless.
A sorry coincidence with the China Syndrome being released to theaters, and the mainstream media went to town on them hyping the incident completely out of proportion
How was Three Mile Island not a disaster? That was a partial meltdown of the core, which damaged the reactor beyond repair. According to wikipedia, the cleanup lasted for 14 years and cost 1 billion US$, and obviously, the multi billion $ investment into the reactor were lost, too, after only three years of operation. It's not on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima, they really got lucky, but that's still a disaster, don't you think?
@@MatjesHunts Apologies, I should have clarified. I meant a disaster in relation to public health. Sure it was a financial disaster, but the situation did not actually pose much of a health risk to surrounding residents. I believe Kyle Hill recently made a video covering this recently. I would consider it more of an nuclear "accident" than a disaster. That being said it still shouldn't have happened. It occurred due to bad early warning design, although the actual containment design worked alright since there was never actually a risk of an explosion. The only reason talk of a possible explosion ever took place was due to a miscalculation by the NRC.
@@beewyka819 Nuclear disasters are typically like that: very low deaths, very high financial cost. But if your core melts down, that is definitely a disaster.
Reminder that nuclear accidents are incredibly rare - there’s only really 3 nuclear power accidents in history and all 3 were mentioned in this video. Meanwhile, coal power puts more radioactive particles into the air every year than all nuclear power plants in history.
@@imjashingyou3461Russian navy should never count since they’re either built crappy or they are so badly taken care of it would bring any captain and admiral under court martial in the USN- the same navy that has reactors in both the Virginia class Submarine and almost every single aircraft carrier currently in Service without any damage or neglect to its reactors
French here who's working in for EDF in a nuclear power plant. Few things to be said: Firstly, the safety of french reactors is immensely better than any russian or Japanese technology. The technology involved is different and the AIEA (the independent nuclear control organism) imposes on us a lot of control even if the slightest non dangerous fault is detected. After Fukushima we had to improve all of our facilities' safety in regards to earthquakes and tsunamis eventhough the threat is basically non-existent in France Secondly, you didn't mentioned how we ended up with an industry with a critical lack of investment. This was largely due to the European integration that imposed on us some ludicrous competition policies. EDF has to sell at a loss one third of its production to the competition. We are the only energy producer in France but we finance a flock of privately owned company who are supposed to develop their own production site, which they do not. So basically, we got the French taxpayer who paid for the construction of the powerplant, who subsidies private entities, and who buys to these company the electricity providing them a huge margin. This policy was pushed by Germany in order to get a European energy market where all of the competitive advantages of France have been nullified. It is a complete rip off
It was also Germany (and I think Greece, not really conversant on that) that opposed Brexit. As an American, you make it sound like they wanted to creste a gov't. external to and independent of every national gov't. in Europe, so they could afford to be more stubborn and intractable in the 21st Century than in the previous five. I am overstating the situation, but I imagine not fabricating it from whole cloth.
Saying that your plants are safer than Japan's is an impressive claim, since Japan is supposed to have among the most modern 2nd-gen plants in the world.
@@HuntingTarg so to keep it simple, the plant of Fukushima Dai Ichi used some reactors built in the 70s, so not so new. Their technology is a reactor of "boiling water", meaning that basically their is only one cooling system, and that the coolant is on direct contact with the core of the reactor, so a single leak in that circuit leads to radioactive contamination. The French technology is a reactor of "pressurised water". The coolant which is on contact with the core of the reactor never exist the confinement structure. There is a secondary and a tertiary cooling system that is not radioactive. That means that in the case of a fusion of the core, the Japanese system is dependent on their electrically powered pumps to inject water directly into the core of the reaction. In the French system you have some redundancies that allow us to operate some safety operation through the secondary and the tertiary cooling circuit, which limit the risk of critical failure of the entire system
@@HuntingTarg and you can add to that that the safety processes of the Japanese industry at the time was vastly exaggerated. TEPCO is a private company focuses on making a profit. They had two internal and one external audit that pointed out the risks of their system before 2011 but TEPCO didn't addressed the concerns. Safety is expensive
@@HuntingTarg oh and did I mentioned that in Fukushima the used nuclear fuel was stored in swimming pools located on top of the reactor? So when the pressure of the reactor had the confinement structure burst, all of the used nuclear materials were spread around the area
Closing down working plants that are not in immediate danger or in need of a service while at the same time approving open-pit coal mines to increase "energy independency," now that's progress right there.
Thats not whats happening. The area which is allowed to be mined for coal has been limited. And the limit has already been decreased. "Approving open-pit coal mines" bs.
Don't forget they not only got rid of clean energy (nuclear is cleaner than solar and wind and also safer too! believe it or not) but they also had to rely on importing energy from countries using nuclear and they had to import fossil fuels too! Leaps of progress have been achieved in germany.
One of the things you missed, and I hope you cover in your next video, is that SMRs aren't just easily replaced because they're small, they're easily replaced because they are designed to be built and assembled in a factory, instead of being assembled in-situ.
They also use the fuel less efficiently and create even more waste issues than the large facilities though. And the Nuscale projects in the US are already falling apart as time to market and cost increased significantly.
@@BugMagnet You're right, the replaceable nature generates large volume of waste which hasn't been accounted for and requires new waste streams. For reprocessing facilities, such as in the UK, there are large volumes of operational waste generated that currently do not have a waste stream or route. SMRs will have to be designed to meet future disposal requirements, or at least have decommissionable parts that can be easily decontaminated or size reduced for appropriate waste conditioning. In the UK, this would have to meet acceptance criteria for the GDF as national strategy has shifted from spent fuel reprocessing. SMR manufacturers would probably also have to fund the various waste conditioning streams for the waste generated as a result of their products, as existing disposal options for LLW for example are restricted to existing operational large-scale plants and facilities. Waste predictions and strategy through to 2135 published in the 3-yearly radioactive waste inventory report compiled by NWS (Nuclear Waste Services) do not include waste generated by additional waste streams such as SMRs that have yet to come to fruition.
@@BugMagnet The main reason nuclear reactors are inefficient is to avoid handling the fuel over non-proliferation concerns. With waste reprocessing fuel use can be much more complete. (Which means that the waste only needs to be stored for decades instead of millennia.) It it very difficult to do waste reprocessing in a way the prevents nation states from diverting material to nuclear weapons. France is able to do it because they are one of the established nuclear powers.
@@jamesphillips2285 That is the advertisement I have heard a lot. Upon looking into the topic of closed fuel cycles I found both the USA and France managed to build fast breeders that up fuel use by orders of magnitude. (closed fuel cycle instead of open fuel cycle) All those projects were then buried by their designers over the same issues of horrendous economics and poor reliability. Yes, it solves the waste proble, but actually using that technology is so expensive no one would ever want to do that. Which brings the whole nuclear industry back to "lalalalala nothing bad will happen for a million years lalala" The next attempt at this was supposed to be molten salt reactors. One was run in china and big surprise, molten salts eat through pipes. As soon as someone manages to build a reactor that can produce affordable electricity with waste that only needs to be handles for one century, I will be all for it. But good luck competing with renewables that are dropping below 5ct/kwh all over the globe.
@@jamesphillips2285 This is an interesting one. I can only speak from experience in the UK, I don't have the means of knowledge elsewhere. The UK, having reprocessed more spent nuclear fuel than the rest of the world combined, and that's at one plant in particular (there were two major reprocessing plants, THORP & Magnox.) What made Magnox Reprocessing so successful was the natural enrichment of the Uranium metal fuel that compiled the Magnox fuel rod. This restricted the fissile content to some 0.8%. Magnox Reprocessing's chemical separation plant could use large scale stirrer tanks instead of smaller and restricted pulse columns of THORP, which were geometrically restricted in design to allow neutron leakage as such to prevent a criticality. The plants were designed to output similar quantities per year, but THORP's added complexity generated a multitude of technical problems during operation that ultimately led to an average output of just a third of its true capacity. Reprocessing in the UK doesn't necessarily eliminate the length of time required to store the waste, it simply volume reduced it it (using the French AVM process actually) by diverting the fission fragments dissolved in the organic phase of chemical separation during reprocessing into highly active liquor, concentrating the liquor, storing it in HAST (highly active storage tanks) and mixing the evaporated calcined liquor into glass through its vitrification plant. The concentrated nature of the fission products generate sizable quantities of heat output that require passive convection cooling for up to 40 years prior to any consideration of storage into the geological disposal facility, which it'll remain for the rest of days. The PUREX chemistry allowed for large volumed of Plutonium waste to be generated, which the UK has the world's largest stockpile of, and no final plan for where this will be disposed of. Various plants are being constructed for the handling of these special nuclear materials to contain it for the short-medium term. Ultimately, reprocessing whilst proven successful for the UK has been met with significant technical challenges and cost. Magnox Reprocessing held up better than THORP despite nearing 60 years in age as opposed to THORP's 25 years of operation, but the last fuel rod went through the charge machines last year, ending the UK's reprocessing programme. Further spent fuel will simply be held within storage ponds until the final disposal becomes available. It's simply cheaper than constructing a modern reprocessing facility with all the regulatory oversight that would inevitably delay its construction. This doesn't consider the effluent wastes generated that require ion exchange or flocculation either, or grout encapsulated waste generated, such as sheared Magnox swarf from the fuel cladding.
Yeah, I notice how 'cheap' wind and solar is - especially when they are not producing any output, which is more often that people think, and 100 % backup of renewables is required mainly these days by CCGT gas turbines - which are the only things fast enough to keep up with the roller coaster unreliable output of renewables, and keep the lights on.
@@chrissmith2114 The weather forecast is not always wrong. Additionally the forecast is not for one region, but all regions. That is why I wrote one needs a certain amount of installations. Forecasting the output of a single windturbine would be difficult.
@@old-pete The truth is that unreliable wind and solar need 100% backup from mainly quick reaction CCGT - UK is set to build at least 20 new CCGT stations in next few years. You have in Australia the madness of EV being charged from diesel powered generators. Solar in UK between October to march contributes very little to grid and then only a few hours per day. Just look at grass and trees in UK, they stop growing October and start again in March ( hint they use same 'power source' as solar panels ). Suggest you look a Sheffield University 'Gridwatch' site which graphically shows inputs to grid every 15 minutes, and has daily, weekly, monthly and annual graphs, just watch how often renewables do not turn up.
I think there is an error at 11:33 regarding the cracks found in French nuclear reactors. Error might be too strong a word but something important is missing: While the cracks were indeed found, they were found on a backup security system which is meant to be used in order to inject water under high pressure to cool down the core in case of an emergency. This is by no mean something you should ignore and backup systems should be in perfect working condition because you want them to be working when you need them. Cracks were however not found on the primary circuit in which water circulates under normal operating conditions. If your French is good enough, there is a lengthy parliamentary enquiry on this topic you can find on youtube,
Thank you for giving us the real information on the defects found at the plant. Fear mongering is common when it comes to talking about Nuclear Power and I'm not surprised that this wasn't as big a deal as the presenter made it sound like. Also I find it troublesome that such a big commotion is made about the lack of certified nuclear vessel welders. This could be rectified by training programs in a matter of months. This is not an Astrophysics or Quantum Mechanics type of long term study. It takes proper instruction and hours and hours of practice (months of daily work), not 6 years of post graduate work. Pay them what they are worth and you will attract guys from all over the world to come there and do the necessary quality work. These types of certified welders are worth more than most Engineers. Just because they can't do the Calculus doesn't mean that they are not highly skilled and highly intelligent.
There are welders but the number of hours they can work in this part of the reactor has an annual maximum set by law. That said, experienced welders are in high demand and there are not enough of them. However, this is a common problem for all manufacturing industries.
What I don't understand is how the France of the 1970's was able to construct all these reactors that have apparently performed quite well, yet modern day France seems unable to equal even a fraction of these past accomplishments. It's also quite baffling that France would go all in on nuclear power and then completely abandon it so quickly, these potential problems should have been quite obvious.
because of politics. The French green party is in part financed and influenced by the German green party who is using German taxpayer money to spread its anti-nuclear ideology in neighbouring countries.
We have lost the "savoir faire", that's mean that we don t have anymore enought engineer or expert il fonction. We simply lose our knowledge by not contructing new site for more than 40 years. Also now security has way more hight standards, that's means more cost and even more technicals needs to construction.
Politics. Nuclear energy had bad reputation for too long, politics decided to go against it for too long, and we lost the knowledge. => Oh Fukushima: let's decommission every nuclear plant. Oh no more gas: let's build more nuclear plants. etc. Baffling as you said.
I was extremely into environmentalism even from when I was young, and the opposition of major green parties, environmental groups etc to nuclear power was always the thing that confused me the most. Sure, once I learned about Chernobyl I was scared of nuclear fallout and treated nuclear sources with the respect they deserve, but it seemed so strange to want to ban that entire form of power generation when thousands and thousands of people die every year of coal mining related injuries and illnesses and we were acknowledging that we had to use less fossil fuel.
@@Zwiebel4stop for a moment to think about those statements. If renewables only was cheaper, Germany/Denmark should have cheaper power than France /Sweden who use a lot of nuclear. But they aren’t. Ask why, and you’ll see the flaws in the math. Highly recommend podcasts by Chris Keefer and Robert Bruce, substack by Doomberg that cover the data in detail.
@@rubenwillmarth9731 There is a lot more to installing renewables than just the cost. Wind is incredibly cheap. It has become the cheapest form of power generation today. The reason why we don't have more of it is simply because political reasons and the required distance to inhabited areas prevent energy companies from building more.
This is always the same folly of waging war on symptoms instead of working on human (spiritual) progress. Thus the ugly power tripping we see where the German Green Party is one of the biggest ruiners of the environment. Because their motivations aren't authentic, they serve the US empire.
You forget one important point: france colonization of Africa allowed them to get Uranium easily, stable enough to invest in 50 year plants, and at dirt cheap prices.
One Problem of re-stating nuclear power in germany: There's noone to work at those reactors. The old guys are entering their pensions now or work to safely dispose of the old reactors. Since everybody thought the exit was coming, there are no universities teaching nuclear engineering etc. anymore. We lost the know-how. Not to mention the general lack of workers in this country...
DTU (Technical University of Denmark) just started teaching the physics and engineering of nuclear power plants again. I also bet some of the old guys could be persuaded out of retirement -- just like old COBOL programmers were up to Y2K. It's a problem that can be solved easily (and quickly) as soon as the regulatory climate in Germany turns for the better.
@@mitropoulosilias we ain't importing nuclear scientists, we are mostly importing labour to fill positions in healthcare, construction etc. So positions which don't get filled by Germans themselves. And yes the tax burden is a problem, but mostly because it doesn't get reinvested correctly due to inefficient buocracy
The needed craft should be generalized ... to something like "Mission Critical Safety Systems Engineering" or "Dangerous Technical Processes Management", not specific to nuclear technology only. There will always be need for such expertise profile and good money in their careers. Also the problem of lost knowledge is unacceptable in age of information, it is clearly lack of law-mandated procedures for knowledge management in place and nonexistence of national (and international) infrastructures for retaining such important documentation.
Amazing nuclear ever happened in the first place since it had never been done before and there was no one with experience and no universities teaching it!
I feel an immense amount of dread every time I remember the nuclear shutdowns and reinstating of Russian gas and very dangerous brown coal plants, as a German.
Modern fission power plants do not have the same risks as those ones. Fission technology is actually thousands of times safer than fossil fuel power plants. You do know burning coal, oil, and natural gas releases toxins like FUCKING MERCURY into the air that we end up breathing in, yeah? Modern fission plants are specifically designed so that if they have a problem, they do NOT explode. The only reason Fukushima turned into such a disaster is because the plant's owners didn't want to spend money to protect it from tsunamis, even after the government said they should. The only reason anyone would ever have reason to fear nuclear power is ignorance and emotional bias.
I get the same amount of dread when i google maps germany and look at the open slag pits. They have destroyed large parts of their country with coal mining and let people that don't understand nuclear energy scare politicians away from it.
@@NOBODY-oq1xr1. It's nowhere near inevitable 2. Modern plants are extremely safe even if several steps go extremely wrong, even if a meltdown does happen, modern containment structures make it practically a non issue, even Fukushima had 0 recorded deaths for example
Chernobyl was _the_ example of extreme danger in shoddy, unsafe design. This is not the case for any nuclear power plant in Germany, France, the US, Japan or even Australia (yes Australia has a nuclear power plant - it is for producing radioactive isotopes for medicine rather than for generating electricity, but still, it's there).
It’s crazy that the two greatest nuclear disasters were caused by utter incompetence and cataclysmic natural disasters. And then that every other nuclear disaster had a higher death rate by suicide than by cancer and radiation sickness
@@stevesherman1743 Other nuclear power plants on the coast got hit just as hard, but didn't suffer any meltdowns. It wasn't the location of Fukushima Daiichi, but rather the fact that they didn't build a sea-wall appropriate for the location, ignored advice on locating emergency generators high up and didn't provide enough isolation for safety systems located in the basement. There was also incompetence too, as the engineers had neglected their responsibilities to test safety systems. Meaning they had no idea if the ICs were functioning, since they didn't actually know what operational ICs look like.
All nuclear disasters are caused by incompetence. That should tell you us humans are just too incompetent to run this safely. Let's just go with wind and solar instead. It's even greener, no toxic waste and can't blow up.
@@stevesherman1743 Fukushima earthquake or tsunami could have done nothing, but a catastrophic "human error" was made - during the design, the location of the emergency generators was changed in the halls at sea level where they were flooded and they should have been several floors higher - at the level of the access road to the power plant, there was no emergency power supply led to an explosion of hydrogen which could not be removed in the reactor buildings without power
France literally got Germans killed "defending" uranium supply chains, this isn't even funny. The 2009 plans (Atom-Austieg )Merkel dismantled (Atom-Austieg-Austieg) before backtracking in the most stupid way (Atom-Austieg-Austieg-Austieg) actually build 80% of the current renewal capacity in 5 years (given the 15 years that passed and over 50% renewable coverage, I'd assume we'd be in a much lower carbon position on the original plans).
@@theplayerofus319 Renewables are a lot colder and 5 states exceeding their needs in renewable production should reassure the failures further south that 2009 policy would have served them.
I don't know where you saw that "nuclear reactors typically have a lifespan between 20 to 40 years". Pretty much every commercial design is designed to last *at least* 40 years. As for the corrosion crisis, had you checked on your spreadsheet, you would have noticed that it typically affected *newer* reactors. The affected pipes were emergency circuits, meaning they couldn't have burst at *any moment* as you claim, but only if safety injection was used. That's a big problem for sure, but it was not the ticking bomb your phrasing implies. Sorry, but I think you could've spent a little more time researching the subject, especially as an engineering channel which should have the skills required for a more in-depth understanding of the issue. As it stands, your video ends up making erroneous statements regarding the causes and consequences of this crisis.
That is a fair assessment of the video. Some of the comments provide far more factual data. I also enjoy how he glosses over the fact that solar and wind require standby sources to maintain the grid. By definition, that standby source CANNOT be solar or wind. France has it right and China is actually building more nuclear power plants than ANY country on the planet.
Real engineering has a bias against nuclear, i don't know why, but it is very obvious when you watch multiples videos in which he talk about nuclear energy. He will only present part of the facts. brush off the politics around them and just get to the conclusion that nuclear energy isn't worth it, look at this video Germany the most industrialized and wealthy country in Europe is emitting massive amounts of CO2 and they are injecting billions of euros to transition to renewable energy, but still failing, the conclusion of the video is that France is a ticking bomb while exporting electricity and trying to modernize their nuclear power plants. It's ludicrous coming from someone who is usually rational.
You have to realize that people who advocate for solar and wind are liars. Everything they say about nuclear, gas, solar and wind are a pack of lies. He's not just "wrong," he is deliberately misleading his audience.
4:41 For everyone who is confused by the solar energy in France from 2PM to 3AM, the x-axis does not show the time, it shows the past 24 hours, so it begins somethere during a summer afternoon. You make very good and well researched videos.
Yes, it was clearly labelled as such. But it would be more intuitive if the hours were aligned with the clock, or make it obvious, by showing, say, 30 hours.
> "This is what a day looks like in France" > TIME (PAST 24-HOURS) > 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 Who could have possibly thought that it _wasn't_ for a day
@@williamstucke5445 what you are asking for is to have statistics and graphs that are not made to mislead you or trick you into believing in a bias. This was clearly done on purpose.
Im a MechEng student, and just took a discipline about piping engineering. The teacher lecturing worked on one company that built some of France's and Belgium's Nuclear Power plants. Pipe fatigue and stress rates and cycles are thoroughly studied and are easily measurable. Pipe maintenance should be the top priority in maintenance plans. If the responsible entity let the pipes crack to breaking point, they are slacking, and may be acountable for millions of deaths
The increased cost of Nuclear power isnt the result of increased safety measures, but rather an monumental lack of investment in the nuclear sector after the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters. One of the ways this has manifested is the complete lack of experience and expertise in the industry, especially around building these plants. Believe it or not, the first nuclear plants built in the early nuclear age were also incredibly expensive and over budget/time. However, these costs and unexpected failures were reduced, in part by building tens of these in a short time span, allowing for the spread and building of shared knowledge and expertise, in both the labour force building them and the institutional knowledge shared between engineers and project lead, but the baseline expertise was also higher at the time, since this was an era that already had massive investment in energy, technology, and infrastructure.
Great video, as always. Just a few things I'd like to add : 1) There is currently a massive overhaul of the older reactors, known as "Grand Carénage". The objective is to get on the same level of safety as the newest plant, the EPR2, by heavily upgrading almost every aspect of the process : a new "tub" to collect corium is being added, all the piping and hvac systems are being checked to be sure it'd resist a massive earthquake, all the cableways are reinforced, and so on and so forth. The main goal is to be able to push the reactor to 60 years, and perhaps even beyond that, while maintaining safety standards among the best in the world. 2) FLA3, or the new EPR being build in Flamanville, costs discrepency mainly comes from a policial issue : all the others reactors are made in pairs, which allows for a much better "scale effect" than building one reactor after the other. For exemple, if you are stuck on a problem while building the first reactor, you can use the knowledge to modify the second one while building it, and in the end you'll end up with 2 reactors in less time that it would take you to only build one. 3) FES, the nuclear plant of Fessenheim in France, was closed ahead of its time because of political pressure by Germany and Switzerland. This was a huge blow to EDF economy during the corrosion episode, and is still something that is resented in France (I work in the field in France, all the views above are mine and not my company's).
And Fessenheim was indeed a disgrace and disregard of security concerns of your Eastern neighbours. Nothing wrong with putting NPPs on solid streams, but doing it downwind and away from your major economic hubs is quite telling how little you care about your neighbours. Flamanville: Be honest about the total cost of construction as assessed by the Cour des Comptes, probably the least biased numbers one can get on such a project. That, Hinkley Point C and Olkiluoto cost overruns are abysmal. And just for the record, I never was against NPPs and lived 3 km from one (Leibstadt) for two years.
@@fan2hd277 Well, economy of scales are there - in theory. But if their goal of 3 billion is multiplied on the first attempt, how much better they'd do for number 2 is quite speculative.
As someone working in the nuclear field, the video is very accurate about the importance of continued focus on nuclear. After a 30 year of neglect, it can be extremely difficult to continue operating and constructing nuclear plants. Nuclear benefits from scale and society knowledge. Both Germany's plan and France's plan are good. Full nuclear or zero nuclear are best. The lukewarm commitment is the most expensive and least beneficial. As the workforce gains knowledge and designs are standardized, additional nuclear plants shouldn't be vastly over budget.
Yeah this is the thing everyone seems to miss, if you do not already have a huge domestic nuclear energy industry it is just not feasable to run on nuclear and if you have to choose wether to build a renewables or a nuclear based energy solution then nuclear is just to slow to get started.
Why full nuclear or no nuclear? You can have less plants but you just have to commit to a cycle of building a new one while decommissioning older ones.
Pardon my ignorance, i don't have a engineer degree, but this kind of reasoning feels like a non sequitur: "we don't build nuclear power plants because we don't build nuclear power plants". If the objective we have is to reach net zero in 2050 (enough time to build quite enough reactors I THINK?), at least now i don't see any other way to cover the base load that intermittent renewables leave uncovered. Couldn't we plan to import expertise from other countries like France?
@@piethein4355The most beautiful thing about all of this is that "renewables" are not 100% good for the environment, nor better than nuclear energy, the wind itself increases the local temperature, because it decreases the kinetic energy of the wind, reducing its range and efficiency in absorbing the thermal energy of the place, in addition to preventing the moisture from the sea from reaching the center of the larger continents. 100% nuclear is definitely the best, in every way, it's greener, cheaper, produces more energy and produces less waste.
@@fabianodendrella5526 If I remember correctly, California in the US and Australia faced some blackouts for betting too much on renewables like solar panels and wind.
You missed one major fact. Germany was to be considered main battlefield in cold war times. People were not only against nuclear power but nuclear weapons, too. And both are related at least in mind. From a practical perspective. Think of captain Schettino or pilot Lubitz running a nuclear power plant as chief engineer. You will only know after something is getting wrong.
@@jamesmccurdy The video was only about presenting nuclear power as good and not about illuminating why Germany is against it. It was also full of mistakes, like France being a net exporter and Germany importing electricity from France. Germany has been a net exporter of electricity on an annual basis for many years. And the people in Germany have been demanding the development of renewable energies since the 80s, but the corrupt CDU has made many criminal deals with the coal industry and systematically destroyed e.g. the German solar industry, which was the world market leader. Over the decades, there have been many very big scandals around the topic of nuclear power and final storage, a lot of police violence during protests (see "Castor transports"), lies, deception, lack of transparency, corruption. Simply a lot of things that have stuck in people's heads over several generations. All this was not illuminated at all and everything was simply presented as if the Greens had no concept and as if Germans were just scaredy-cats without a plan.
A good point, especially relevant today, as in, July 4th 2023. There have been reports of Russia planting bombs at the Zaporizhzhia NPP that is under their control and the Ukraine government claims to have knowledge of the Russians telling the civil work force to clear the NPP by tomorrow. They have made threats to blow it up already, let's hope it is just threats.
Natural gas (methane, specifically) can be green depending on how it's sourced. The method of extracting methane from CO2 under the presence of a catalyst are well understand, we just haven't been be able to figure out how to do it yet. That is the best way to deal the climate change that has already happened: literally sucking extra carbon dioxide outside of the air and turning it into fuel
15:05 This is the exact reason we had so much underinvestment for years, French politicians basically said the exact same thing and first wanted to reduce France's nuclear share of electricity generation to 50% of our electricity grid. France's issue is also down to its red tape, Finland has the same EPRs 2 and they just launched their first one.
Yea Finland does. And the reactor was started operation over 10 years late. There were a lot of issues. I remeber at least one was that a French company supplying critical components went bankrupt. And the reactor itself was compleatly new desing and would have been at the the originally planned date of completion of 2009 been the largest nuclear reactor in Europe or even the World.
@@jokuvaan5175 Yes, the reactor started operation severely late and over budget, but large part of that is because the knowhow of building nuclear power plants has been lost. Some delays were because: -Areva (the French company in charge for building the power plant) was not at all familiar with the Finnish authorities, who actually wants to see and inspect fabrication and quality control plans for critical components before their fabrication can begin. (=Inexperience with Finnish authorities) -Areva had previously only supplied the reactor, not the entire powerplant. They effectively jumped in to a huge construction project with little to no experience. -The people who were involved with building the currently operating nuclear plants did it in the 70's and 80's. Skilled and experienced people in this field have retired a long time ago. -The design was new, which quite understandably caused delays both in design and fabrication phases. For example, some critical components were made 2 or 3 times to reach the required quality level with the selected fabrication methods. -Key personell in TVO (the organization who bought the reactor) had no relevant experience in managing large construction projects. -Safety requirements have become much more strict since the previous projects, requiring the design and implementation of new safety systems or redesign of old systems. If a similar project was to happen within the next few years, there would likely be far fewer delays and cost overruns. First of all, the companies and key personell involved have gained experience in design and management of large construction project. The new design has been built, new fabrication methods have been tested and improved. Some design issues have been solved. Companies have gained experience working with the authorities and each other.
@@andersvj Because it was also a pilot reactor (so going over budget is expected just like in any industrial pilot programme). Now that it works and that most of the required knowledge has been acquired, building the following reactors will be both faster and cheaper.
Actually no, the exact reason is Germany hates seeing France with the nuclear advantage, so they lobbied directly and via the EU to bury France's nuclear program. And now they're like "oh look, it's dangerous because it's not maintained enough". Yeah right, it's not maintained enough because they requested it to be abandoned.
As a german, I feel like I have to add a few points here: 1. The decisions made around Nuclear Energy are unfortunately more politically motivated than based on the actual power-grid needs. Until around 10 years ago, Germany used to invest heavily into Solar Power, encouraging installments on residental homes. Due to political reasons (& heavy lobbying from the coal industry) the CDU-lead coalition axed most of the subsidizations and partially banned residental homes from adding power to the grid. These political changes also lead to Chinese manufacturers quickly overtaking the previously pretty strong german solar industry. 2. A big part of the debate about Nuclear Power is around the storage of the waste - a topic that's unfortunately missing here. We had some accidents with salt water damaging nuclear waste barrels, which lead to people protesting against having waste in their area. To this date, we still haven't found a suitable non-temporary storage solution ("Endlager"). Funnily enough, the state of Bavaria is one of the biggest supporters of Nuclear Power, but refuses to accept new power plants built and waste being stored in bavaria.
You do realize that you can recycle nuclear waste and reuse it as nuclear fuel, right? You don't have to store it at all. The nuclear waste can be reused many times before it fully decays. In the end, the problem comes down to cost, not technology.
The way I’ve seen is basically digging a deep hole into the ground. Keeps it away from life, and it doesn’t move much… just needs to be away from water reservoirs. Nuclear waste, the Kind regularly produced, is either a radioactive concrete molded into a cylinder, or equipment used by people which I don’t see why they couldn’t do the same with.
@@johnnk3256Also the nuclear waste problem has been long solved with the new technologies. It is way safer to use some underground land to store nuclear waste in your town compared to breathe fossil fuel combustion gases
@@felixw19: Nope it solves it. Recycling nuclear waste brings down the decay time from hundreds of years down to two decades. Which is more than manageable. Not just that, each time you recycle, the volume of the waste also goes down. We've had this technology for like 20 years now.
remember burning lignite also emits radioactive particals in the air. A nuclear plant contains its nuclear radiation, but a lignite plant trows all its nuclear radiation in the air
And nobodey is burning more coal... Why does this bullshit argument always come up? The only time Germany had to shorty increase the ammount of coal being burned was last year....because Germany had to overproduce a lot of electricity short term do to a) gas price exploding and gas security in question do to the russian invasion and b) France fucking up their nuclear power plants and needing a lot of imports Literally without german coal France would have had a bad suprise last year. France and Germany were literally trading gas and caol because germany needed non russian gas for heating in the winter while france needed coal electricity to keep the lights on. Since then coal has again been on a decline in Germany with renewables being (finally) build faster then under the previous gouvernmeant. Also its a funny myth in general that people outside of germany think back when germany had more nuclear power palnts were werent still burning shitloads of lignite coal. The share of coal was bigger then today back during germanys pro nuclear times because it was simply cheaper then building more NPPs. The nuclear phase out in Germany (sadly) didnt really replace much coal and gas yet because what happened was that nuclear was replaced by renewables as share of the energy production. This was mainly do to the last gouvernmeant under Merkel being absolute coal and nuclear loving shitheads. They killed germanys renewable industry and refused to phase out coal do to "the jobs". Originally in 2000 when Germany started the phase out of nuclear there was a very simple and logical plan: build up renewables while phasing out coal and nuclear slowly over 20 years. The cosnervatives simply forgot about the "build renewables" part. For a stop gap measure russian gas was supposed to be sued because it could function as a very flexible base load with renewables until alternatives would be build (or gas turbines modified to use hydrogen gas). Gas turbines have the advantage that you only have to turn them on when it is needed and you can turn them of basically immediatly again unlike coal plants or nuclear energy. However, that also wnet to shit under the last gouvernmeant who decided to go full on russian gas instead of using it as a stop gap measure during transition. And now both Germany and France are fucked because they fucked up both their strategies the last 20 years and the internet debattes which was the "better" desaster :D
And then also the ridiculous high CO2 emissions and the insanely large open pits to mine the coal .... As a German I hate the anti nuclear sentiment in our country....
Very important factor to bring about: Coal is the MAIN emiter of radioactive material to the nature; air, soil and water. Thats because all soil have some radioactive material mixed in. Mining is a really insuring way to actually pull radioactive soil from earth and spreading it all over.
@CheapSushi it's not that I'm aware of the fact that dirt is slightly radioactive. But the claim that coal is allegedly the main emitter of radioactive material is new to me. I've been on countless discussions and heard every talking point, but this was never mentioned. I live in Germany. Funny how this isn't something worth mentioning. So, yes: I still like to know the sources for that claim.
So I just looked it up and the reporting in Germany is NOT good about this. I've read briefly about modern filters, but also about certain studies on the surrounding environment of coal power plants. I need to do some digging. Thanks for informing.
Coal is a main emiter now. But in case something gets wrong with nuclear wast storage, the situation completely changes. Germany already made its negative experiences with nuclear wast in underground storages that almost contaminated groundwater. This is the reason why people are concerned about nuclear power.
Nuclear reactors are like bridges. Big expensive. But their supposed to be reliable. The reactor should work from the time you were born until you have a midlife crisis. Much like bridges tho. They’re grossly underfunded. And a lot have hit that midlife moment. But nuclear reactors are permanent infrastructure. You have to have the cooling ponds. The on-site storage, the millions of miles of copper. Shutting down nuclear is the antithesis to the green energy future we deserve. Another thing. Is that nuclear is the only power source with an energy density to make extraterrestrial mining even the slightest bit worth it. Trust me when I say, that if they find uranium in the astroid belt it’ll be gone faster than you can say Chernobyl.
I know it was part of a sponsor plug, but from an ex-engineering student, the advice at the end was bang on, particularly if you take Python a step further and learn how to use anaconda virtual environments, notebooks (google colab, jupyter, ipython, etc...), numpy, scipy (especially optimize and integrate) , pandas, matplotlib/seaborn, etc... I had to do a hard pivot two months into my undergrad dissertation because my original plan wasn't working, because I already knew Python and the above libraries from previous work I was able to apply the research I had already completed and quickly write and debug a program to automate nuclear fuel geometry design, which saved my degree. I also used Python and the above packages extensively in my MSc to write a hypersonic flow solver for basic geometries in just a week or two. Even just knowing the basics goes a long way, I recently used my knowledge of Python to write an Excel macro in TypeScript, a language I'd never used before, that automated data scraping from spreadsheets that would have otherwise taken a team of people weeks, saving a project that needed that data to inform a decision from going over its deadline.
The very least i expected is seeing a comment about a programming language and its libraries when clicking on this video that talks about nuclear power and politics to some degree lmao
I've been avoiding python because of some issues I have with it (main one being speed) but Now that Mojo is coming out I'll be going back to it but will most likely modify it to have syntax I prefer like brackets instead of indents and changing some keywords to match go syntax.
Python couldn't have had a better endorsement. In the past, I've had skirmishes with Fortran, PL/1, Basic and C. You've kindled the interest of an old retired guy.
10:15 the 20-40 years referenced is the initial licensing period in most countries. Most plants will last at least 2x the licensing period, and many will last 3x or more. Most of those are plants that need inspection and refurbishment. They almost definitely aren't decommissioning unless they were under designed and/or poorly maintained.
As a german, i say its wrong to completely phase out nuclear fission power. Using the old existing reactors to increase the time we have to shift to better alternatives is WAY better. The german reactors are for the most part at end of their expected lifespan, but that is no reason to simply shut them down all at once. They were phased out bit by bit, but still way faster than they shouldve, and the investment in alternatives hasnt facilitated this kind of process. There is no question, that increasing the use of coal powerplants is hipocracy in regards to the plans for "carbon neutrality". The accidents of chernobyl and fukishima were two very specific incidents where there was alot of human error involved. Thats not to say, that this couldnt happen somewhere else in the world, but the fact remains, that the biggest actual issues with nuclear power, are humans and radioactive waste.
as a german i can say, that you are wrong. Only 5% of the electricity was produced from nuclear energy in 2021. And now we have 46% renewables, in 2021 we had only 41%. Nuclear Energy is very stupid. 3 Generations are making a big nuclear party and 3000 Generations have to take care of the waste. When you think that only 10% of the world energy comes from NPP
@@alexanderdekeuyper2990 "it's a good thing to force a whole industry out of fossil and nuclear powerplants" And what magical energy source are you going to replace that with, if you're also not investing enough in solar/wind/hydro yet? Seems like this all was a lot more about fossil fuel industry not wanting to lose money, than about any actual good reasons. Coal plants have killed more people than all the nuclear disasters combined, many times over. And if unfiltered, also emit radioactive particles just out into the surrounding air. Face it, it's just dumb, reactionary fear-mongering that led you Germans to this point.
German industry HEAVILY leans on cheap energy. This could send Germany into a deep economic crisis. Do you know? Does the EU have rules to follow about nuclear in regards to adjoining nations? I mean, France could build it's reactors very close to the German border, and with prevailing winds, Germany could be the biggest victim in France's (theoretical) reactor meltdown.
One of the most important factors that nobody seems to be talking about when it comes to nuclear power, is the production infrastructure for them, or rather, the lack there of. What I mean by this is essentially the fact that so few nuclear reactors are being built in the world, that there isn't really any efficient mass production for their parts. This also means that if, for example, every country in the world would start building at least one nuclear reactor every year, the market for their components would become so lucrative that the components themselves would see massively reduced prices compared to right now. Not to mention the boon to the research and development sectors for nuclear power, and for standardization.
Even then, it's not really mass production. It's not massive to produce something 200 times per year. Sure, maybe there are small improvements with producing them in bigger amounts, but not mass production. Not like solar whose price dropped by 89% between 2009 and 2019. From $359/MWh to $40/MWh. It's about $30/MWh now. While electricity from a new nuclear power plant costs about $155/MWh. The price of Li-Io batteries has fallen by similar rates and wind, solar and battery are together now cheaper than nuclear energy. And they get cheaper every year. Nuclear would have to become much cheaper in a short period of time. I don't think that's realistic. Especially as if we would match our energy demand 100% with nuclear uranium sources would be empty within 10 years. With current demand we have 200 years but the more we use it, the faster it's gone. Alternatives are not ready jet. Maybe we could find new uranium sources, but it would make it more expensive.
That's what has happened in China. Their supply chain is well developed and they have the cost of a nuclear reactor down to US$2.6B per GW. Construction time is usually under 5 years. Note that these reactors are built with IAEA oversight and must meet the IAEA safety regulations. South Korea are down to around US$4.5B per GW. Once supply lines are established in Europe, costs will similarly reduce.
@@kevinpaine7893 well, China might fulfill safety standards of the reactor (where I still think we would want to have them even safer), what China is not fulfilling is constructin sight safety.
i have another thing to comment on: the part where you said a nuclear power plant has a life expectancy of 20 to 40 years i think is wrong because thats just the amount of time before the license for a power plant has to be renewed and repairs have to be made.
I personally believe in Thoriumreactors, it is a concept that the UK already practiced with and the Netherlands is going to build a couple reactors that use this.
It sounds nice but isnt a solution nobody was able to scale it up or make it a economic option. Befor we have thoriumreactors we also should have fusion reactors. I just would not wait for them.
France being an importer of electricity in 2022 is a historical first. Especially ironic as it happens at a time when French industry is minimal having been methodically destroyed over the past 40 years. The 2022 situation should have been inconceivable as the electricity issue had been solved brilliantly decades ago when France still had builders. The only causes of that sad state of affairs have to do with selling out to foreign or corporate interests, incompetence, ideological blindness and overall treason of the national interest on the part of the current French elites.
Wasn't another major reason climate change? Because of the drought, the rivers needed to cool all those nuclear plants got too warm, so the power plants couldn't operate at full capacity.
One reason was also that water levels were too low, or the water was already too hot to properly cool the reactors. Renewables don't have that problem and don't need a base load. PV and Wind are very complimentary. With smart vehicle charging, boilers that make the water hot when there is a lot of renewable production you can cut your storage needs way down. If you have nuclear reactors, it makes sense to keep them running until you replaced more polluting energy production with renewables. Germany killed its renewable industry a year after deciding that nuclear is being faced out, like they decided decades before. They could have a grid made up of >90% renewables by now, but the politicians loved coal money more.
@@Adrian-jn9ov Its not possible to run the european energy grid with renewables alone. This would only be possible with extensive battery storages (which are still problematic from a enviromental perspective), and the renewable energy production capacity has to be much higher than in a compareble grid with a high base production. Relying on EVs as energy storage might be a very risky strategy, because you have to hope that there are enough EVs with full batteries plugged in, and you basically have to force the people to buy a certain amount of cars. This strategy is not compatible with the goals to reduce car usage in cities for example. You can also not drain those EVs completely empty, because people would not participate in such a system when its possible that they want to go to work and then notice that theri cars are at 3%. Its not useful to look at the grids of individual countries. Europe has one large grid and national grids cannot fuction independent. It makes no sense to replace all fossil energy production in a single country with renewables, the production in all countries has to be replaces. Its highly unrealistic that the EU can run a 90%+ renewable grid, at least not with current technology. Germany did not only kill its renewable and nuclear power productuin, they also killed their coal plants. Germanys only hope is that the other european countries wont do the same mistake, otherwise they are fucked.
I went to the largest pit mine in Germany on a school trip as a kid, it was insanely large and destructive, the huge on-site tracks for coal and the monstrous excavators were cool to see but even 25 years later I still remember the scale of it all. There really does need to be a mix of SMR's and clean alternatives for any real goal of future energy demands, but to completely rule out nuclear because of a couple accidents (some from bad design and/or placement) is shooting ourselves in the foot.
@@Unknown_Genius Yeah, it seems like so many of the 'solutions' they keep touting are just moving the carbon to an out of sight, out of mind kind of place. I was reading an article a while back about the solution for nuclear waste and that it had mostly been solved, can't remember where but I think someone also made a video about it, might have been Kyle Hill or someone like that.
Actually the main arguments against nuclear (from the non-dogmatic middle ground) are the strongest and most convicing - nuclear is far too expensive. It is also not as reliable as we are told - the "down times" are suprisingly high. It is also not as flexible as other forms of large scale generation - which is increasingly important in an industry dominated by renewables.
@@1968Christiaan Indeed, and the problem is that such a divisive topic is never discussed in good faith. There are good anti-nuclear positions about costs, downtimes, huge upfront cost, access to water when europe is going through droughts, etc... (I say that as someone heavily in favor of nuclear and, while hating Macron's guts, thinks his energy policy is by far the best in Europe)
Well, now he’s buying. They just transport it through India, burning a lot of fuel. There used to be efficient gas pipelines. But there are two advantages: 1. Germany no longer depends on gas from Russia. Depends on fertilizers from Russia. 2. Russia will not freeze due to global warming.
My grandparents life hardly 2kms away from the Obrigheim powerplant and the rural area I live in in the north was supposed to house a disposal site of the reactors so this topic was always part of my life, thank you for this informative video
To add two points: a) the nuclear power plants was always state of the art of this generation, they were continously updated. b) the generation was among other choosen by FJ Strauss, 'cause he speculated at atomic weapons. So the NucPowPlants wasn't as efficent as they could be.
I am from Chinese nuclear industry. From my point of view, I do not agree with point a. There are many numbers of new nuclear power plant built in China, but their technology levle kind of fall behind other industry. Due to the high cost of proving the usefulness of new technology intended to be used in nuclear power plant, the whole nuclear industry do not advance at the same level as other industry but fall behind massively. Most nuclear power plants in French and America might has the same issue as China, since they are built mosttly during 1980s. The new nuclear power plant of EPR from EDF is kind of failure and do not advance as much as it should. AP1000 is new though, but I do not understand as much as EPR.
In Finland we need 1 extra nuclear power plant of traditional scale to make ourselves completely energy independent. This was cancelled because Rosatom wasn't to be trusted anymore as plant deliver & fuel provider. Then again we need to replace 4 reactors (80%) like France, so in total we should start during this decade 5 new reactor projects. We have first EPR2 reactor running, so when we have run it a few years I think we should copy-paste reactor replacements from it. After that Finland should use localized smaller modular reactors on city level to provide heat and baseline energy for cities to replace gas/coal for heating during coldest winter days.
Finland stopped using Rosatom for political reasons against russia, not because Rosatom isnt trusted. The finnish are extremely anti russian and your gov did it due to the war in ukraine and so you dont have to be dependant upon russian energy - as that is what the EU has advised its members to do
This really needs more upvotes. I think almost no one in the discussion ACTUALLY knows where the radio active materials come from and how much of a claw Russia has on that market. It's WAY worse than the one on oil / gas. People are stupidly funny sometimes. I think if they just see an egg in a pan they believe it might have come from the supermarket, not a chicken.
Finland already have 2 Russian reactors and they have bought fuel for them from Sweden for decades now. Westinghouse in Västerås-Sweden is one of the largest surplyer of fuel for VVER reactor, and the largest outside of Russia. So there is really not a problem not buying fuel from Russia. So the current 2 VVER reactors in Finland have no problem getting fuel
@@tehabe " marvel but an economic nightmare." You are wrong about that. OL3 is making a massive profit despite being quite a bit over budget. That is unlike windpower that makes huge losses despite being on budget.
I live near 3 mile Island and was watching the TV news every day during that time, since that time I have spoken with some of the former workers. Human error such as post it type notes covering part of a screen used to monitor the station were a major contributing factor but almost no one mentions that.
What are you talking about, everyone mentions human error, lol. It's part of why a major driving factor in reactor designs of the last 50 years have explicitly had the goal of reducing the requirement for human interaction especially regarding critical functions and emergencies. Newer designs can't melt down in the same way because they aren't relying on human input to prevent a meltdown.
@@KingBobXVISo many people in the general populace ignore what actually caused the incident at 3 Mile Island. I never even got a decent chunk of the story until five years ago when I finally thought I’d just google it myself. So when people are talking about the actual situation, yes, they mention human error because that’s a normal thing to report on. When people are scaremongering about nuclear power plants or just mentioning the accident in passing, they don’t. They super don’t. For the former category, it implies that there is a safe way to operate a plant without human error to say that. It’s just such a hot mess.
Possibly had his own agenda. Three Mile Island scared the s... out of people who read the detailed reports as it exposed the appalling engineering that occurred in nuclear plants and the very dodgy to almost non-existent risk analysis that was carried out, Fukushima continued on with that tradition. TMI had such wonderful engineering las a critical valve that was activated during reactor shut down but did not close when it should have, critically the control panel showed that the valve had activated properly as it showed that an electrical signal had been sent to the valve, it did not show the actual position of the valve, to determine this, the operators would have to go down to the reactor building and physically observe the valve. So a root cause of the destruction of the reactor was dumb engineering or cost cutting on a couple of sets of contacts and some wiring, a simplification but you get the gist. Everyone should know about the stupidity of the designers and builders of Fukushima in the placement of the emergency generators and switching gear, as well as the complacency of the operators in not quickly correcting the issue once they became aware of it. I can't even contemplate how anyone could misinterpret or not understand the Tsunami risks of the plant - one in a 100 year event does not meant that the next event is 100 years away, it could be tomorrow, there could be three in a row mere weeks apart, why would anyone settle for such a high risk when... ohh, never mind.
@@scottslotterbeck3796wow only zero deaths? This must mean that nuclear power is completely safe compared to toasters which kill hundreds every year! Let's built ten thousand nuclear reactors in every country on the planet! The nuclear waste we will just pile up in some poor African country or give to the fish in the ocean to deal with. Wow only zero deaths that's awesome!
14:09 This graph is absolute BS. Like always, the storage problem is being ignored. If you calculate the price of wind power or photovoltaic, then battery storage needs to be included.
Backup has to be calculated for every power plant. This summer a nuclear power went offline because of an electrical fire in Texas. Thx to large batteries, this over 1 GW of power drop had no effect on the grid.
There are a few german political specifics missing. The first phase out was planned similar to what you named as the "middle way". A slow reduction of nuclear power, while ramping up renewable power. The problem was than reversing this plan and later making a new phase out which had no real plan behind it (the one Merkel is responsible for). Instead the renewable industry was systematically destroyed (Germany was leading in the tech for solar and wind energy before Merkel) and a switch to natural gas was favoured (with massiv lobbying). When they than relized that was a shit idea, both from the view of climate change and the dependency to dictatorships like russia, it was to late for both ways. Going back to a slow nuclear phase out was not possible anymore and the the renewable energy was also not build up good and fast enough.
The sad thing is that you probably believe this whitewash. The German solar industry is dead because it is not competitive. And the foreign industry only sells in Germany because the plants are massively subsidized. And the disaster would have happened in exactly the same way, perhaps with a few years' delay, if the original plan had been adhered to. This is because renewable energies are simply not capable of replacing conventional power plants.
Dictatorship like Russia? I see... So, it this wonderful plan of yours, mind telling me where, exactly, you planned to get the fuel for those Nuclear reactors? Where is your uranium getting mined? What are you doing with the spent fuel? Do you have the technology and expertise to create the entire industrial chain? Without Russia. Oh, wait. You don't have to answer that, because you already gave an answer with your actions. It's not a very creative solution, I have to say... Here we go...again, and again, and again....Drang nach Osten! We all know who will triumph in this newest attempt to "Manifest Destiny" your way into taking over Russia. I'm just surprised that German greed overpowered rationality and suicide was chosen over peaceful coexistence. Since you consistently take our kindness for a weakness, we will have to explain it in your own language. Generalplan Ost, except we don't want German land. We just want to be left alone. If Germany is an irradiated wasteland, we don't have to worry about attacks from the West...
Common myths of the anti-nuclear movement. But this is simply nonsense. There is simply no way(!) to replace nuclear power plants with renewables. The plan was completely hopeless from the start.
@@11everhard What we are seeing now is people owning a house taking their electricity supply into their own hands. There are some mistakes being made in terms of the extra going to the grid not being paid for so people try to waste it or turn off the supply instead, but it will have an impact on the long run. There are more ways than we thought and there is constant research on storage and optimization. The best scenario would be to be freed of both fossils and nuclear, but it will never happen if we don't go out of our way and try (unless there is another accident before then that would somehow be worse than the others).
Thank you for taking the time to explain the use of Iodine tablets. Often it gets treated as a cure all for radiation, so it was good to hear it explained right.
It was hysterical over-reaction. even as some radiation was blown over Europe, it was so low, that did minimal damage ... I live near former Uranium mine and many miners lived in our city
@@skepticalmagos_101 Exactly. That is what it is used for. Hollywood is especially fond of using Iodine pills for scenes that involve radiation that would never have radioactive Iodine present. Most TH-cam videos that discuss incidents that require the distribution of Iodine pills get the specifics of the distribution correct but generally do not address why. I like that the reason for the distribution was discussed to help work against what seems to me has become largely a Hollywood stereotype.
My grandfather worked in Germany's first nuclear power plant; the Versuchsatomkraftwerk Kahl (the 'test nuclear power plant Kahl'. Built in 1961.). Though it wasn't actually build in Kahl, but right outside of it. In the neighbouring town of Karlstein, where I grew up. To this day, the town's coat of arms displays an atom to commemorate that. Bonus fun fact about that town: Karlstein is named after 'Karl dem Großen', better known as Charlemagne. The "father of europe" would often travel through the town to get to his favored hunting grounds in the nearby Spessart woods. And ~1200 years later, the nuclear power plant was built right by the river he had to cross to get there. Crazy to think about that.
There is even Netflix series about this plant - Dark (2017). In fact, the plant caused some timeloops and end of the world. I still think it was right decision to shut it down
I don't know why Nuclear isn't considered "renewable", isn't France recycling some of its spent nuclear fuel? I heard from another video that MOX fuel (recycled uranium + plutonium) accounts for 10% of France's total energy output.
@@comrade107 Nuclear is a very costly (have to factor in nuclear waste storage and nuclear power plant decommissioning, both costs that the tax payers will have to take care of). Germany has successfully shut down ALL nuclear power plants and is still producing enough energy to supply neighboring countries who can't fulfill their own needs, for example France. Not shutting down nuclear energy just slows the conversion to full renewable energy power production, so it was the right thing to do. If you aren't convinced, then please enlighten us now with your arguments why you think it was a desaster to cut nuclear energy from the mix.
@@user-bw6jg4ej2m that's russian propaganda or what? nobody needed to cut their heating at all and coal only needed to be burned to support the neighboring countries that couldn't support their own. also Germany has probably the best coal power plants in the world, but ofc it's still better to have 100% renewable energy which is the ultimate goal. just happy we don't use nuclear power anymore, since it's obvious that that's a very bad choice.
@@moos5221 upfront cost, storage of spent fuel and safety are quite valid points. However, all major economies US, UK, China,India and even Japan(despite Fukushima) have concluded that nuclear is going to be a key stable source of energy (at least in medium term) and hence are doubling down on it. Solar/wind is great but not stable enough to support the energy needs of a big country alone. They have to be complemented with something that is more stable, low carbon and relatively on demand, until the battery tech matures further. I understand your sentiment of going 100 %renewable (something I desire too) but we have to be realistic. Also, the first three points of concern are either already addressed or being addressed through new solutions like deep underground storage vaults like in Finland, Smaller modular reactors, reactors for spent fuel etc. Hope that answers ur question:)
Just for the record: Today, France is producing 25g of CO2 for every kWh it produces. Compare that to Germany’s 200g in summer. You can track that in real-time on electricity maps.
People seem to forget / or are not aware that the original CDU/CSU plan wasn't coal. They banked on expanding connections towards the Kremel made in the early 2000s - it's why they would consequently go on to essentially put the better renewable option on hold. So it's not really down to not going nuclear but not going nuclear AND putting the actual already planned alternatives on hold.
Yes, but for one, only one nuclear accident of his old reactors, could change everything, at that numbers CO2 is not dangerous for life, instead a Fukushima level in France would be a complete disaster not only for France, so it's not the same apples to apples comparison.
Intresting video ! I actually worked at the EPR contruction in Flamanville. It's important to note that this reactor is a prototype one and we expect to use all the knowledge learned to make the EPR2 more cost effective while of course being as safe as possible. But being a prototype means often running over budget and time, and that applies not only for nuclear reactors... Look at how much money SpaceX put into the Falcon 9 before it properly worked... Also a sister reactor (also a gen 1 EPR prototype) recently started in Finland at Olkiluoto. I sincerly hope we can put the nuclear industry back on rail in France. Coupled with renewable energy, it makes for a stronger energy grid by being more diverse and less prone to single point failing or common factor failing...
But ask Areva how much they lost with the finnish reactor..... I like the EPR design, but if they can't be built in less than 5 years for less than 5E9€, they are not a viable options.
You forgotten the EPR Reactor in china, the name of the plant is Taishan 1, it was shutdown because the cooling system caused the Fuel elements to get damaged. The plant is in operation again but well its china, ob they solved the issue fully no idea.
@@asokawhite i believe it was shut down recently again. China doesn't have a record of being transparent regarding safety and issues... Having EDF involved in the operation of Taishan helped a bit as they pushed towards shutting down the plant to inspect the fuel rods
Our government is tripping, like it was one of the top ten nuclear plants which were built and they just don't make use of it, no they destroyed it instead🥲 Like i would get it, if we had tsunamis, tornados, earthquakes or other natural disasters in germany, but they are non existent here. Either our politicians are either dumb crazy maniacs or get controlled by other nations, who want Germany to stay down. Maybe even a prank, else I don't get how someone could make so many decisions which cripple a country more than it will help😅
German scientists couldn't figure out how to engineer a sustained nuclear reaction which is why many of us are not speaking German today (or Japanese). Verner Heisenberg miscalculated the amount of highly enriched uranium by a factor of 50, he thought it was plausible that we'd need 2000lb of heu to have a critical mass.
11:39 This problem wasn't a result of decades of underinvestment but caused by entirely new technical issues, discovered thanks to new scanning technologies. French reactors have the world's strictest standards. This is incidentally why they were shut down: the importance of cracks is overstated as they were on redundant emergency systems.
@@moos5221 Yes and that is why France took the decision to shut down its nuclear reactors in the middle of winter with Russian gas cut off. It was the right decision.
@@julientabulazero103 Germany was there to export energy to France in 2022, no problem. The french reliance on russian uranium is a serious problem though, France paying for the Russian war effort, sad story.
@@moos5221 France main supplier of uranium are Canada, Khazakstan and Australia. You are however right to point out that many reactors in Eastern Europe rely on Russia because they wereuilt during the soviet union time to use russian rods.
@@julientabulazero103 France still imports plutonium from Russia, making it one of the only countries in the EU to still pay Russia blood money for fuel.
Yeah, several countries and peoples in Europe are very anti Nuclear. Heck all the "Nuclear power no thanks" stickers used in the protests all over the world were designed by a small group of protesters in Denmark, one of the first nations to oppose nuclear power over concerns of safety and disposal of radioactive waste. Denmark doesnt have any full scale nuclear powerplants either, only a few small test reactors at a research facility from the 50's and 60's, and even there, the nuclear waste barrels from them have been mothballed around for decades with no permanent long term storage found anywhere in the whole country.
These nuclear accidents are NOT the reason why we Germans have shut down our nuclear power plants. The reason is that there is no way to get rid of the nuclear waste or safely store it. Surely those accidents might have pushed the demonstrations against nuclear power but they (safety concerns) were NOT the main reason.
I don't know how other countries are dealing with it but in Germany there is no suitable place to store the radioactive waste at the moment. We have been searching for over half a century and we are still searching for it.
@@charakiga @charakiga I never argued about that. I don't think it's good that Germany is dependent on other countries energy exports. Nuclear energy is definitely better than coal. Germany is a very small country and while countries like the US have large uninhabited areas Germany is extremly densely populated. Obviously nobody wants to have this shit in his backyard and there is simply no place in Germany where you could store all the nuclear waste safely for millions of years. For over half a century Germany has been searching for a suitable place but until this day we have not found it, chances are that we'll never find one and we can't just look away from this problem, ignore it and have some other generations fix the problems we have made them in the past. And then there is another problem: How can we warn other people in millions of years that there is extremly dangerous radioactive material down there? What if future inhabitants don't understand our warnings? We also haven't found any alternatives yet to get rid of the nuclear waste. My opinion: Nuclear energy is indeed a good way to counteract the climate change, but until we have not found a solution to solve these problems, this is simply not an option.
I find it interesting that Germany is so pessimistic about nuclear plants, if you were to make a list of countries most able to run them safely you'd probably put Germany at the top, they're kind of associated with industrial excellence. It's a topic for a different video but... are any of these countries anywhere near ready for the ban on petrol cars? Maybe they're expecting fusion power in 10 years...
No, they are most definitely not ready. No matter how much they exclaim it to the heavens. Unless they want to make Electric Cars absolutely free for everyone and production can keep up with a massive surge in demand. It also puts a lot of stress on the energy grid.
buillding a car or a handtool is not the same as building a network with nuclear power plants. French excells building at large scale (TGV, Total, nuclear, ...).
If they're expecting fusion power they will be waiting a very long time and pouring obscene amounts of money down the drain trying to get there that could have been far better spent elsewhere.
German here: A big issue Germans have is with the longterm storage of spent fuel rods and nuclear waste. Germany is densely populated. This makes finding a possible location for longterm storage for the next couple of thousand years basically impossible. Personally, I never really had any doubts in the safety of German reactors. Chernobyl has taught us a lot, and we aren't at risk of getting any tsunamis or big earth quakes like Fukushima. In the long run, I prefer not having any fission reactors in Germany because of the issue with nuclear waste. However, I do think the exit of fission energy was poorly, if not disastrously, planned and executed. We should have massively invested in other low-carbon energy sources. Shutting down our reactors and supplementing the energy production with coal power plants is fundamentally the wrong move. After Fukushima, the Merkel government basically decided to shut down the last reactor within 12 years, and even compensated the energy providers with 2,4billion€ for making them shut down their reactors earlier than originally planned. Instead of 2023, the shut down date should have been in 2040s or so. This decision was purely reactionary. At the same time, we became increasingly dependent on cheap Russian gas. However, the issue we now have is rather tricky. As far as I know, the recently shutdown fission reactors are not in a condition that would allow restarting and using them again. So either they would have to undergo an extensive refit, or Germany would have to build new nuclear power plants from scratch. Both options would take years and new power plants would be incredibly expensive. Never mind, that it will basically be near impossible to find a new location because of all the NIMBYs. (Germany built and finished a fully functional nuclear power plant that never started producing energy, because the people living next to the power plant stopped it - I think it was an issue of improper planning permission etc.) So there is no quick, temporary solution to supplement coal power plants. TLDR: Longterm nuclear waste storage is a huge issue in Germany. I think in the long run, an exit out of fission energy is good, but Germany wasn't ready and prepared for it. The exit date was too early. Now, there is no easy and quick solution to bridge the time until more low-carbon producing energy infrastructure is built. (ps.: I just want to add that German households don't use electricity for heating. Heating is done by oil or gas burners (my sister's newly built house even uses geothermal energy). I see a lot of non-germans think that we will sit in cold homes during the winter now, because we shut down our nuclear power plants. This was never an issue. And had we not stopped importing cheap Russian gas, at the same time as shutting down the last nuclear reactors, it probably would have never made the headlines in the international media.)
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The typical example that the best intentions may lead to worse outcomes
Very Interesting video, love it. Taiwan is also having a major power issue. Originally our power grid consist of 20% nuclear power, 47% from coal, and green energy only took 3%. But just like the Germans, the Taiwanese started to be afraid of nuclear power, especially after Fukushima nuclear disaster. So the no.4 nuclear reactor construction was canceled, and our government construct more coal & natural gas generators. Besides the negative impact on the environment, one of the big problems is that we don't produce coal, natural gas, or oil. Based on the thread next door, the supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil can be cut off pretty easily. This makes Taiwan very vulnerable. For the green energy, we don't have many choices. Our wind is seasonal, and destructive typhoons are common during summer. Geothermal power is also not a choice since our hot springs are acidic. Other green energy options also have their own problems and due to space, I am not going to mention all of them. Personally, I support nuclear power. Not because it is perfect, it's definitely not, but it is necessary. I think it is the stepping stone for us to find the next solution before we destroyed the environment.
So you're saying the problem with using coal, natural gas, and oil is that you have to import them. But, does Taiwan mine its own uranium? If not, how is nuclear different? Of course, things like solar panels and batteries tend to require imported components . . . but that's a longer term issue; once you have a bunch installed, sudden supply shocks aren't really a thing.
Taiwan one of the few countries stupid enough to fully build a nuclear power plant and never put it in operation (see Lungmen NPP). This "honor" it only shares with Austria, Spain and the Philippines. Perhaps Italy if you want to count it right before they also banned nuclear energy there.
@@purplelibraryguy8729 A uranium fuel load in a big reactor is 60-80 tons and lasts 4-5 years. So with a single shipment you can potentially buy all the fuel requirements for several decades - if you want to. There's plenty of uranium suppliers, and even if the entire world is against you, as a country with access to the ocean you can also extract it from seawater if you need to (it's about 4-5x more expensive than uranium from mining).
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The last nuclear power plant which was shut down was in the city of Landshut. I saw it many times and a lot of people gathe in front of its last day to commemorate its work. I didn't realise at all that a city that small had a nuclear power plant. Interesting.
SO LOOKING FORWARD to your micro nuclear episode!! This one was so insightful and I was sitting here wondering when you would get to micro nuclear. Sad to see it was a "See you next time" mention. Still, glad you're doing it. You're one of the few channels I have set to notify. Thank you for your objective and deep insight into this subject. Oh and I use Ruby and Java with dabbling in Python and Shell. Just never got deep into Python even with its ubiquity. Thank you again!
I hope he covers waste reactors. I LOVE the concept of waste reactors. The main remaining problem with nuclear isn't really safety anymore, it's waste. (Obligatory reminder here that we have an urgent greenhouse emissions issue, NOT an urgent nuclear waste issue.) There are some companies who can build reactors that generate a lot more power from nuclear waste material, and their own waste products have FAR lower half-lives.
@@webx135 and thorium! Less radioactivity. I saw a waste reactor story some time ago saying we were wasting like 90% of uranium's half-life or something like that? Insane!
@@webx135 Do we have a waste issue if all the nuclear waste generated in the US since its inception, can fit into the area the size of a football field?
@@SirOpinesALot No. Hence my reminder that we have an urgent greenhouse emissions issue, not an urgent nuclear waste issue. But also, keep in mind the half-life of this waste. Without post-processing, nuclear waste is effectively permanent, and no storage solution is permanent. That's why I'm interested in waste reactors.
People in Germany were mostly protesting because of the long term storage of nuclear waste was mishandled and not because of the fear of nuclear meltdown. One of the old salt mines designated for long term storage had water flow in in the first couple years, showing that it wasn't safe to contain the nuclear waste.
Yeah this will be a massiv issue with the NIMBYs when the search for the final storage is moving forward. Building up the trust again will take a long time.
well but it was recenly discoverd by me and doing resarch aobut acrute infomation about high grad nuclear waste and how nuclear stuff works. so i fonud out that in realty that most high level nuclear waste most radioactive prodacts can be in fact used for RTGs or nuclear sterling engine fuel for 30 years then would become mostly inert after 30 years for the most part. also the rest of the stuff in the high grade nuclear waste has soo many usefuel rare earth element isopotes that can be also used after wards. this is expacly the pure leftover zecuom 90 isotpoes that is needed for steam, aerospace jet and rocket terbines metal alloys. also that tacly high level nuclear waste could also just be safly stord in long term nuclear sterlling or rtg power plant and waste conament power genrator felcasitys for 30+ years and generate power on the side. this is bescue a very sinfict aomut of a allready known radioactive mertal that is the most of the hazerd is bascly alot of it is stroum isotpyes that fully decays after 30 years turns into bascly the same zecuom 90 that huge amonuts of it could be used for massvle aerosapce indutrey. in fact thats why alot of post cold war ussr rtg genrators where radied for that super rare zicouim 90 metal that been left in the fully decayed stroum isotpye powered russen rtgs back in the 1970s.
@@silphonym But that is literally what NIMBY means. We need a storage but Not In My BackYard. I am in a Region that is looked at in the Nuclear storage search right now. I mean we have with most of the Windpower parks that get planned and you instantly get a lot new bird lovers that search for rare birds to stop the projects. It was not even meant negative. just the political reality that every search for a storage will mean a lot of pressure from the local population.
Long term storage of nuclear "waste" is a myth and not needed at all. Nuclear waste can already easily be re-used and literally recycled. With the advance of technology we will even be able to completely neutralize all radiation.
I just want to add some context/extra infos to Germanys abandonment of nuclear energy: - A huge unsolved political problem was the long term storage of nuclear waste. Especially, when the "Asse"-Project (storage within a salt mine in nothern germany) turned out to be unsafe (leaking water, danger of ground water contamination); Still, there is no true solution, how to make that nuclear waste depot safe. Ironically, the environment minister responsible for that project was Angela Merkel - The decision of Angela Merkel's government to shut down the reacors was highly controversial at the time. Just a few months earlier, a law was passed by the CDU that the nuclear could run at least 10 further years. However, after the Fokushima disaster, Angela Merkel announced in a public proclemation (without pressure of the green party! ) that all nuclear reactors should be turned of as soon as possible. Energy companys sued the german government and got a lot of financial compensation to shut down reactors early. - As mentioned in the video, nuclear energy isn't exactly cheap, because of the extremly high safety standards compared to regular powerplants. Since german chancellor in the early 2000s Gerhard Schröder was best buddy with Putin (he later go an executive job at Gazprom) and there was big supply of cheap russian gas I can imagine, that it seemed like a reasonable strategy at the time, to swith from the troublesome nuclear power (with all the demonstrations and unsolved waste storage problems) to gas imports. - The german goverment was conviced in the 2010s, that russia would not threaten their economic ties since it also benefitted from German technology. The russian-german relationship soured within the last decade (compared to Schröder times), but even after the Krimea annexation the construction of Nord Stream 2(which started ~2011) was not stopped until the war in Ukraine 2022. So it was most likely an economical decision, based on wrong assumption of the future (we turned our heating down to 15° to keep regular heating prizes in winter 2022). - The german dependancy to russian energy imports (even the german gas storage were sold to Gazprom and were "suprisingly" very low during the 2022 energy crisis, but have been refilled since then) might be one of several reasons, why the german government was very hesitant to support Ukraine actively in 2022
@@Apodeipnon It's a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Germany is a big supporter of Ukraine. That's why we decided to break our economic ties with Russia.
I was really surprised that this video didn't touch on the storage at all. That's hands-down the second biggest lasting concern for people here, after a Chernobyl/Fukushima/Die Wolke kind of scenario.
Long term storage isn't very difficult, except politically. You could literally just build warehouses and pile it up in there. Not an optimal solution obviously, but it would work.
@@Apodeipnon First I'd like to clarify what I meant with "russia threatened economic ties": Germany thought it could influence Russian political decision making due to their trade connections. It was believed in Germany, that if Russia would go against german political interests, these economic ties would be sufficient to convince them to change their mind. The annexion of crimea peninsula was a shock for the german government, which had to prepare a whole new long-term strategy (I do not know if they prepared/finished a new one ;-) ). What really damaged the german trust in Russian-German economic ties was the reduction of gas throughput through the gas-pipelines during the energy crisis in 2022. Russian proclaimed technical problems, however the russian claims seemed not very convincing from a german perspective. Regarding Nord Stream: From my point of view I still haven't heard any convincing story, either pro or against Russia, how it was done with proofs, which might be checked with open source data. It could have been strategy to increase political pressure on germany during an energy crisis and to start a blame game to weaken the commen resolve within Nato. It could also be a plan to damage russian econmy by denying gas export ... we simply do not know and cannot prove anything for that topic. Last but not least: I disagree that we see is proxy war between US and Russia. It might be true, that Russia wants to dethrone US as global political super-power, but calling it a russian-US war is in my opinion an oversimplification. For example it is against German interest, that Russia has started an military invasion of Ukraine including annexations(with a prepared military build up beforehand). Russia claims it has its reasons (I wont debate if they are good or bad), but in effect that means for Germany, that it cannot blindly rely anymore, that russia will keep the peace in the border regions (where are EU & Nato countries). Germany cannot blindly rely means, that Germany (and especially the eastern EU countries) feels the need for a functional military. This is extremly expensive for Germany (see Scholz 100Billion Euro announcment for the Bundeswehr), because in the last 20years the german Bundeswehr had a severe lack of funding and is currently in a bad state. Beforehand Germany could get by with an underfunded military, because it felt like it was surrounded by friends. Now it has to become capable again, to perform in a potential worst case scenario which is extremly expensive. For those reasons I believe Germany has a big motivation (still not discussing if the motivation is good or bad) to support Ukraine in order to discourage Russia from trying to achive political goals with military means.
Die kWh von meiner 29 Jahre alten PV-Anlage kostet mich an meiner Steckdose ca. 1 Cent/kWh und das ohne Stromspeicher. + Beim E-Auto + PV-Stromüberschuss sind das ca. 0,20 €/100km an Energiekosten. (20kWh/100km) + 1 kWh Solarstrom bei der Wärmepumpe bringt ca. 3 kWh Wärme, Energiekosten ca. 0,004 €/kWh (Wärme) + Die installierte Leistung der Erneuerbaren hat in Deutschland im Jahr 2023 um über +17GW zulegen.
I don't think the age thing is as dire as it's made out to be in this video. Maybe beef up some maintenance and checkup practices, but a lot of western reactor designs (and hell, even RBMK reactors with modern mods) have far outlasted their initial design parameters pretty successfully. They should NOT be shut down until at least the equivalent amount of power is being output from new reactors.
There is such a thing as metal fatigue. Haven't you heard? That is why they give an expiration date for cars, planes, ships. And after a certain period of service, they are forced to write off precisely because of this fact.
@@TheGreatCatsby-pd2tt the plants have expiration dates too, they're just into the future after reevaluation. And no, cars and planes don't have fixed expiration dates either. The latter are regularly inspected and service dates adjusted accordingly. It's actually a great analogy.
Well the reactore containment is whats most critical here. Fatique due to thermal and radiative loads limits the life span, usually this would be far more in the future than the 40 years though. On the other hand, we saw hairline cracks in the pressure containmant way earlier than expected (belgium and england if im not mistaken). And furthermore, maintenance cost is what can make a plant unprofitable.... paired with the costs for decommissioning a NPP, its not a cheap hobby.
A lot of it is a political problem. It's one thing to ban building new versions of a certain thing, but too often the decisions about what to use as a replacement are so far off that it becomes someone elses problem. I think one of the biggest challenges that the world is facing now is that so many things that were once "someone else's problem" are now our problem. It's even worse when it comes to things that last a generation or more. Even worse, too often the solutions are short term, stopgap measures, because the solution is always around the corner. Energy i think is one of those things that needs a technocratic approach. Politicians think too short term to handle it. The free market is also too focussed on the here and now profits.
But "it will be someone else's problem" is exactly the problem with long-term storage of nuclear waste. You can see it in the comments here, people are saying to just put it in some mine shaft for a while until some technology arrives that will let us use it. That's not being responsible, that's dropping the responsibility on the coming generations.
@@kshadehyaena dont be so blind please xd the nuclear waste you are refering to is not even more dangerous than the radiactive waste of coal power plants, which are pumping the air you breath with radioactive material even right now unfiltered....and that is 100 times more radioactive than the most of the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants. educate yourself please
"The free market is also too focussed on the here and now profits" Yeah, just Shell´s stuborness for 10-12% profit marginns is only hurting decarbonisation.
Frances electrical exports to the UK are also imports depending on the loads in each country the connection flows both ways, the same happens with Belgium,Ireland,Netherlands and Norway there is also now going to be a connector built direct from the UK to Germany
Yes, they all import and export, and sometimes switching during the same day, for various reasons: the Kettle effect, the proximity of the production with the consumption site (electricity don't really like to travel long distance) and total production capacity at some times (mostly for solar and wind) But on average, France exports more than it imports with its neighbours. It's a net exporter.
I don't quite know why it's this way, but wind direction refers to where the winds originate. So winds travelling from east to west are called "easterly" winds.
Agree. The reason is that you can physically feel from which direction the wind comes, and what weather it brings to you, not where it will be going. And also in pre-industrial age, it was all important to know where from what direction you could get the power of the wind, or from what direction you had to take shelter from the wind.
All points made here are extremely well made and well reasoned. But I think it can be safely argued that many of the problems explored aren't inherent to nuclear itself, but rather poor management and investment surrounding it, which could happen in any kind of energy infrastructure. But fair enough, the consequences are far more dire with nuclear.
The main problem of nuclear is cost burden created by regulation. With infinite regulation energy becomes infinitely costly. That's mainly a PR problem.
@@ugjhgjfDon’t forget how nuclear energy is actually taxed, instead of subsidized like every other energy source (at least in the US). But even with restrictions like these, nuclear is still ridiculously cheap once you’ve got your reactor working
That's the key problem of nuclear. The high initial costs takes 20-30 years to recoup. If a fickle government might suddenly decide shut your power plant down in 10 years you can't built it.
One point not even mentioned though, and for me this is the most interesting: nuclear waste. As if it wasn't even a thing. I don't know any country on earth with a good solution.
@@henning_jasper "I don't know any country on earth with a good solution." Clearly you haven't done even the most basic search. There already is an excellent solution. Storing the sealed waste underground surrounded by non-permeable rocks.
The topic for germany is extremely complex. It has a social background (elite vs. the simple men) as in France the pension discussion and in the UK the mining strikes. They defined generations. Then there were scandals after scandals, where mistakes made was tried to be hidden by pro-nuclear governments. Building on seismic faults (Mülheim Kährlich, was shortly after shut down because they try to move it against the approved building plans a few metres) or a Thorium reactor burning more fuel than expected (Hamm Uentrop, after too many smaller incidence shut down after a few years). And then there are party funded by the government studies, which put the validity of nuclear energy in doubt. One showed already in the 70s that nuclear reactors will end with large emergencies every 10.000 years. Problem with 400 reactors world wide is, that the time has to be divided by that. Counter arguments argue about the time frame and the reactor analysed for this number, but still, having the chance that you win the catastrophe lottery every 25 years is not good PR. Also shortly before Fukushima the then Merkel government wanted to know after they extended the run time how much money was theoretically needed to insure each reactor. Well Fukushima happened and when the study came out it would be at market value about 70 billion per year. Sure, the number is heavily disputed, but fact is that still the governments have to cover the costs and not the energy giants. So it is again an argument in the elite vs. little man world. With then all the spectacle each year of returning nuclear waste, which had locally more a civil war nature, it is probably good that this episode ended earlier than later. Problem for the future is that slow reacting nuclear reactors are not compatable with fluctuating renewables and that climate change with rising cooling water temperatures lead to summer shut downs in France (up to now regularly covered by extra exports in that season from Germany, as they had about the number of nuclear reactors they used available for exports during the last decade). All in all... it is extremely complex.
Fascinating! Every time I read a German perspective/argument written by one from Germany, it is always stringently analytical. Versus rest of the world where debates have become yelling contests. Something must have done right in german education.
Nuclear power plant are technology, over years it will develop if you keep investing money. We could have small nuclear power which are more safe and easier to build. Small nuclear power plant are possible, they exist for more then 60 years in submarines so this is one way to go. Germany biggest problem is that they stop developing cutting edge technology, and today they burning coal for energy. My point is that Germany could have safe NPP and be developing cutting edge technology but they are burning coal.
The nuclear waste topic fell flat a bit in this discussion. There are always discussion about where to store nuclear waste. The problem is, that a final disposal site, is not just inconvenient for a area. Its more like a disaster for the whole region. The search for it is going on since i can remember. And a final decision is scheduled for the end of this decade. The only viable but morally very questionable solution is to ship atomic waste to other countries.
4:03 The energy price crisis began in 2021, and the reason was that investment in the oil and gas sector was ca 1/3 less in 2020 during the first year of the COVID depression. After the economy restarted the following year, the capacity was lacking. Also coal prices went up in the second half of 2021 increadibly high, causing issues with the electricity market both in Australia and China.
A few observations, I know the video is not long enough to address everything, but some of the data could be misleading. The years of construction of new plants have to be taken carefully because the EPR is a new design and a one of a kind build, it inevitably will run into overcosts and time, but Finland completed its own EPR and now energy prices and emissions are lowering. Every mega project runs into overcosts and overtime, there’s a good video somewhere explaining economy of scale and mega projects that explained perfectly all the shenanigans behind them. Also the LCOE is an obsolete statistics as it doesn’t account for the value of energy generated in a certain moment (ie solar is cheap when there’s sun, but doesn’t account for when it’s dark), there are better parameters that account for much more, LCOE is easy, but doesn’t paint the whole picture. Also renewables have low capacity factors and the cost of a 100% renewable stable grid would be much higher than that of nuclear. What we really need to look at is the energy cost of an energy mix, nuclear + renewables is the cheapest. If we were to build nuclear reactors with a clear plan in mind, and not 3 around here and there just because, they wouldn’t take as long and be as expensive.
Also when you think about it. Electricity prices are going to be the cheapest when the solar panels are producing electricity so you get less money from operating them.
Exactly, unfortunately the european nuclear sector has lost a lot of experience and scale, but once we get back to building more fission plants, they will get cheaper and get built quicker.
I'm just so frustrated we didn't decide to go with Thorium based reactors instead of Uranium all those decades ago. No meltdowns, and plentiful in the amount we have. Our planet would be in a much better place now probably saving over a 100 million people from perishing due to pollution related causes.
@@randomaccount53793 meh, Thorium has it's place but it's much harder to work with. The German Thorium plant was pretty much a desaster. The German Uranium plants on the other hand were some of the most impressive on earth and they had a pathway to vastly increasing the fuel efficiency, decreasig the need for imports as well as the amiunt of waste. We should have just kept builsing those.
@@Tupsuu kinda, there’s a lot to talk about costs and prices, to begin with they’re mostly unrelated and the ladder depends almost only on the energy market (it’s extremely complicated how prices are decided). There’s also the fact that renewables get a lot of incentives, in Germany for example when there’s an overabundance of renewable power they pay industries to power on their machines (straight up blank running) so they can get state incentives from selling renewable energy (it costs less to pay the industry than to waste that energy) and they even pay other countries to shut down their wind turbines so they can export. It’s a clown show.
I truly believe Nuclear Power is the best source of power at this point of time and will be until solar, hydro and wind power gets much more efficient. Based France for using it.
There's a theoretic max efficiency to wind, solar, and hydro that is determined by raw physics and thermodynamics. They're not too far out from diminishing returns now, so it's just going to be nukes
@@kayakMike1000 True I get what you mean and you're most likely right, so strange how people don't just look at the science and pure maths to see that nuclear power is way better for efficiency and effects on the environment. I would even consider that despite nuclear power being bad for local environment, nuclear power is way better for the global environment but that's more complicated to explain and I'm typing on phone right now.
The problem is that every summer France has to shutdown almost half of their reactors because they don't have enough cooling water so what do they do then? Import energy from Germany...
About college professors wanting to help. I’d say in my experience 50% are only teaching as a requirement to maintain their position and funding of research projects that they are much more interested in. At least this was my first hand experience at my public university given how often professors failed to attend their office hours and how repeated complaints to the dean were fruitless. To clarify, this was for undergraduate school.
This is definitely true in Finland. Maybe 30% of the professors are actually interested in teaching. Some are so bad you're literally better off watching lectures on TH-cam than wasting time going to their lectures.
I am French and I witnessed the downfall of Germany's excellent nuclear and safe electricity production. As France is in Europe, we have to trade electricity to other countries. I find it incredible that the French have to provide for the others' mistakes and suffer ourselves... Note that the German coal is incredibly inefficient and polluting due to its peculiar natural composition... Yes, constructing and maintaining a nuclear power plant is very expensive per KWH compared to wind or solar powered plants. But, it can produce electricity when there is no light and where there is no wind (and it lasts several decades)! I do agree that, even if the French nuclear power plants' are ones of the safest in the world, we do have to have a more "green" approach. But, until then, this is the greenest, sustainable and capable energy production we have to date. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that there are plans to build shore generators which will use tidal energy to make electricity in France. The electricity market in Europe really needs a video on its own, especially the laws which literally forces EDF (Électricité De France) to sell 150 TWH at a loss to "comply with the European competition law" (some crap like that)... Another video would also be good concerning Germany's law makers to torp French's production of clean and durable nuclear electricity, "because they don't like it" (these are my words). I am not like a pro nuclear electricity guy, just a man who had an 800% increase on his bill and wonders why, since we are 70% autonomous in energy production thanks to nuclear reactors... Love me or hate me, these are my thoughts. Your can find extended information on the European laws and facts. Make your research. Many loves :)
Speaking of mistakes. In 2021 and 2022 France needed a lot of help from their neigbours to keep the lights on, while a huge part of the French nuclear fleet was under maintenance... France decides themselves at what price electricity is sold to the competition. It is a way to subsidize electricity prices in France. France still produces electricity with fossil fuels and these prices went through the roof.
Hello there. Frenc historian here. The nuke and hydro mix is from De Gaulle and Pierre mesmer who had plans about it since 1961. The war in 1973 just forced VGE to applie the plan of Mesmer.
Indeed it's stupid that France is so heavily reliant on nucler energy that it had to rely on importing energy from Germany in 2022 to not have a failing power grid. Luckily Germany has a diverse energy production that consists of 50% renewable energy and that enables Germany to be the largest energy exporteur in the world. Many European countries couldn't support their energy grid if Germany wasn't supplying them.
@@moos5221 50% renewable sounds cool only until you ask yourself what constitutes the other 50%... My diet may consist of 50% healhy food, but it won't matter if the other 50% are all fries and mayo. Weren't those major energy exports achieved by burning a buttload of coal? And weren't german houses heated to only about 15°C last winter so that their economy survives without ruZZian gas?
@@user-bw6jg4ej2m lol, where do you get your propaganda from? all homes were heated as usual, unless people tried to save more energy, but that was on their own accord then. i've had 23°C all winter in my house and we didn't even deplete half the gas storage that was completely full going into the winter. it's already full again by the way. Germany had to use more coal then expected in winter 22/23 because of Frances nuclear power plant outages, so yeah, Germany had around 20-30% of it's energy production from coal, this would have been less if Germany didn't need to supply 26TWh of electricity to Austria, France, Switzerland and Luxembourg which were not able to supply for themselves. For comparision, the USA has 8% nuclear, 12% renewable, 11% coal, 36% oil and 32% gas in their electricity power mix. not sure where you are from, but i doubt you have any moral high ground over Germany. I'm happy Germany is independant from Russia now and can still supply it's neighbor countries. Hopefully France will get their act together and stop energy imports from Russia aswell as support their own population. Same goes for the USA, hope they can soon provide for their own and aren't depending on energy imports from Canada and Mexico in the future - and solve the nuclear waste storage problem.
@@moos5221 Germany is currently the shittiest place in Western Europe in terms of CO2 emissions per kWh by far. You don't have a leg to stand on. An average of about 400 g/kWh (France is at about 70 for comparison, and most of the other countries of Western Europe are between 200 and 300. You should be ashamed, not proud. Energiewende is the most foolish and biggest joke I ever heard, and the only thing it produced was the inclusion of methane in the UE green taxonomy and more emissions. As an environmentalist, this is just despicable, horrifying that the destino of the green transizione is in the hands of such imbeciles as the german leadership
@@moos5221 "Germany had to use more coal than expected in winter 22/23 because of France's nuclear power plant outages" Um, are you forgetting about a certain war that forced Germany off of Russian oil, due to Russia using it to strong-arm Europe into not supporting Ukraine? But here you're pretending it's because of French nuclear plant output, while saying THEY (the person you're replying to) is the one going by propaganda? You may as well be waving a Green Party flag around in this comment section, you've just been going by your own propaganda.
I'd love to hear a conversation between you and Kyle Hill on the subject of nuclear power. I believe he is not exactly pro nuclear power but has worked to remove much of it's stigma
*One important note regarding aging nuclear reactors. Before a nuclear reactor start operating the power plant has to get a license from the country's nuclear regulatory authority to operate it for a fixed number of years, let's say 20 years. Before this license expires the plant has to make a choice to renew the license or decommission the reactor. If they choose the former option they have to prove to the regulators that the reactor can safely operate for the next period, let's say another 20 years, which includes upgrading control and safety systems, replacing aging equipment, doing extensive inspections on critical components, etc. Just because a reactor is 40+ years it doesn't mean it only conforms to safety standards from 40 *
"I am once again askin you yo watch the entire video before commenting." No. 🗿 I didn't even go past the 6th second 🗿🗿 I just know that in Italy we don't have nuclear power because if two referendums, but we import nuclear energy from France and Switzerland, and rest assured that in the case of a nuclear disaster in FR or CH we would be very much involved. So what's even the point, why can't we use commercial nuclear reactors?
Excellent video. A few additions: - The power grid in the EU is well connected and coordinated, so Germany's and France's extremes seem to stabilize it - The Merkel cabinet first weakened the mentioned nuclear power exit pushed by the green party, but backed down after Fukushima - In Germany, the search for a nuclear waste disposal site has been going on for 20 years now and no end is in sight - There have been lots of concerns in the regions that profit from coal mining in Germany about ceasing coal-based power generation
Honestly, the waste issue is the biggest hurdle, with Asse 2 and Gorleben being a thorn in the eye of many a german "green". We always think "oh look, no carbon emissions" but forget that it does bring other problems with it as well. It's a tragedy Germany squandered their lead in solar power development to China, as they won't inovate further.
Turns out, the vast majority of waste is low level and/or decays quickly. But for the smaller amount of highly radioactive byproducts, my favorite idea is pretty new, but very simple. A company wants to use oil well drilling equipment to bore holes about as deep as possible into the earth's crust. They've demonstrated using simulations that it would never be able to leak to the surface or even groundwater and would remain safe even if it was directly impacted by an earthquake.
As French citizen living in Germany I can see both side of the problem. You did a very good video, you could also have talk about the issue with decommissioning power plant: coal VS nuclear have huge differences on this matter, as it is almost impossible to completely disassemble nuclear power plant, and it get worse as plant are aging. Same goes for nuclear waste, the salt mine disaster in Germany was a good example how complicated it can be. And finally, alternatives at the end of the video, you could have talked about the fusion project ITER.
ITER won’t make a dent in any statistics till in many many years. A good solution for nuclear waste would be an European solution. Or using the current waste for modern types of reactors - as Bill Gates is promoting (in his documentary).
we can't rely on the expectation of fusion being the thing that save us, fusion will be for or children, or more realistically, our grandchildren. by them it will be way too late. we need to think about what we can do now.
Nuclear powerplants can be completely decomissioned just like any other civilian structure. Never powerplants are easier to decomission because they were designed with decomissioning in mind and because we are gaining more experience. The costs of waste manegment and decomissioning are negligible, less than 5 % of the electricity price.
5% of electricity price? Where did you get that number from? If you dump barrels in the Atlantic like USA did in the 70’s then yeah, sure, it’s cheap. But if you retreat, contains and store for half a million year then no, it ain’t gonna be cheap, mister 5%
Replacing nuclear with brown coal is like being scared that your scented candels will burn down your house so you replace it with an open fire in the living room
There was a difference in priotity that lead to this whole thing. The reason why people were against nuclear power are safety issues and nuclear waste. Going by that, the goal was reached. That this goal caused an increase in fossil fuel energy production is terrible but that just was lower priority than the danger and waste of NPP
@@einherjar4902 There is already a lot of scientific research on reducing the life span on nuclear waste and it looks very promissing. Germany could have bern part of this reseach, but they're becoming increasingly anti-science. They'd rather go back to stone and than to work in modern solutions by supporting science and research.
@hewdelfewijfe its all politics. When fukushima happened people in germany were extremely anti nuclear. Trust in the npp's being run properly were at 0.
Very well made... but dissappointing that you did not mention the issue of nuclear waste storage which was a major argument in densly populated Germany, also rivers are not providing enough cooling water to plants in France because they are suffering under the consequences of climate change
@@joaquimbarbosa896 As of the Asse attempt, Germany has a terrible track record with nuclear waste being "stored SAFELY underground", rusting through the containers and contaminating the groundwater. The US don't have any kind of solid solution, either, and neither does France.
@@nekkowe France literally recycles it, hows that not a solid solution? And Germany doing nuclear bad is not nuclear's fault, its Germany's fault. The US never had much problems with nuclear waste btw, and it really did save a lot on any other type of waste including from renewables
Great advice at the end. I've been working for 9 years as phd student, lecturer and postdoc in Germany and here are my top 2 tips: 1) Studying is not about passing exams, but rather about becoming an engineer. Focus on that. 2) Everyone else at the same age is working 40h per week and you should do the same (but enjoy your flexibility 😉)
Yeah unfortunately you need papers (e.g. diploma) to do the job, regardless of your abilities and real experience. I switched from software engineering to chemistry enterpreneurship and I won't be able to do the job in future (thanks to EU banning more and more basic chemicals) even though I have my own equipped lab and paid and learned everything myself. But pity, I don't have the PAPERS ... So I applied for university and they rejected me for my grades from TWENTY YEARS aho being too low... now I hate the system so much. You can know more than the students, you can even have a working business in the field, learn everything by yourself and it still not enough just because you have C instead of B from chemistry some 20 years ago, when you had no clue about your life purpose and being filled with hormones...
@@dim2389 Burnout. Too much work, then I could not work anymore even tiny bit. After 16 years of non-stop working programming made me sick just thinking about it. I was making numerical optimization library and photo stitching, then one day something snapped in my head and I could not work anymore, having 1 000s emails from customers I just could not keep up... I never cared about AI it was boring even at university (learning Prolog and stuff like that). I like Bitcoin but I would never contribute to it actively apart from running my own bitcoin and Lightning node.
@@dim2389 Another reason is that programming was extremely unrewarding, endless streams of bugs and feature requests. With chemistry I can make dyes, extracts and people actually see the results and finally I have at least some recognition from friends. I can put photos of my makings on social networks - try posting a piece of code - no one will like it... With programming you had just money and nothing else. Now I don't have any money but still being happier than sitting 20 hours a day before computer.
In Australia its different. The grid is already 45% renewable. Nuclear would be 20 years away as regulations dont allow it. Renewables are 30-50%cheaper than coal, which is 30%the cost of nuclear per unit of electricity. Most coal plants are at end of life in 5-10years. Almost certainly the grid will be mainly renewables.
I feel like one very overlooked topic is the capacity factor of each power source. Yes nuclear power is more expensive than renewables, but as they are today, nuclear has a capacity factor of near 90%, while wind and solar are closer to 30%. 1,000 MW of solar might be a lot cheaper than 1,000 MW of nuclear, but nuclear will be producing power most of the time while wind and solar won’t. I hope batter storage options allow wind and solar power to go further, and it seems like that should improve in the future.
I have my doubts on the storage front. It seems a massive challenge to find a suitable replacement for many of the rare metals in batteries (including lithium). Amd mechanical means of energy storage are much less efficient. Batteries are definitely improving, but they are not becoming more eco friendly due to this relationship with rare metals. So a truly eco-friendly energy buffer for most renewables isn't going to happen in the near future. And even if you do improve storage you still have to overbuild your grid significantly in order to have enough excess during high production hours to fill your buffers. In my view, the best usecase for solar/wind/etc is for small, more remote energy production.
Nuclear power plants often achieve 98+% capacity factors. Solar ranges from 18-35%, with the low end applying to places like Germany or UK, and the high end applying to Algeria. There is no place in Northern Europe where solar power makes any sense, in economic terms or even in carbon reduction terms (it takes a lot of energy to make and dispose of solar panels).
@@Elphealer France has let their plants get old and run down. In the US, nuclear has averaged 99% capacity over the last 30 years. It’s possible the French design is less reliable.
Oh! The modular nuclear plants also sound like they could be safer, so you could phase out any outdated or unsafe modules while replacing them with new ones. Thanks so much for the in-depth video! I just found your channel and i love everything I've seen so far!
One of the potential issues that has been brought up with the smaller, modular power plants, is that they will produce more waste/MWH than a single larger reactor. Ex, 1 5GW reactor might produce 5 tons of waste over it's life, whereas the 5 1GW reactors might produce 7.5 tons. Numbers pulled out of thin air, and actual waste numbers vary. Disposing of the waste is our "next issue," despite the fact that many solutions already exist. In fact, there are actually Nuclear Reactors that produce power that can be used to dispose of other reactors waste material. Molten Thorium Salt Reactors, like the one that ran for decades at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. The other option, one that I personally like, was very well discussed by another TH-camr, who has done a whole series of videos on Nuclear Power, and many Nuclear accidents, such as Goiania, Castle Bravo, and Lia. Also Chernobyl and Fukushima. But a suggested disposal method was basically using the deep well drilling tech from the oil and gas industries to make bore-holes about 1 mile deep, far enough below to have multiple multiple layers of safety margins, "drop" the waste in the hole in casks, then fill the hole with concrete. Assuming Real Engineering doesn't mind, I'll attach a link to the video in another reply.
Kyle Hill's video: We Solved Nuclear Waste Years Ago: th-cam.com/video/4aUODXeAM-k/w-d-xo.html I believe this adds to the conversation of micro/modular reactors.
Modular nuclear plants are sadly not developed enugh, they are a feaseable tecnology by technical terms, but their price is still to high. Even more high thn building just a normal reactor
I am once against asking you to watch the entire video before commenting.
Such lofty expectations!
I am once again asking for your support
You tried your best at being unbiased, thanks. Look forward to the next one and an in depth look at what we know about of the Baraka power plant in the UAE. Can we trust the figures. Is it comparable? Obviously you will bring up Nuscale.
But I want to jump to conclusions
I dont need to see the whole video to know the reason. Stunningly because one would expect better from the Germans, nuclear power was shut off in Germany because they were all kinds of massive stupid.
One important note regarding aging nuclear reactors. Before a nuclear reactor start operating the power plant has to get a license from the country's nuclear regulatory authority to operate it for a fixed number of years, let's say 20 years. Before this license expires the plant has to make a choice to renew the license or decommission the reactor. If they choose the former option they have to prove to the regulators that the reactor can safely operate for the next period, let's say another 20 years, which includes upgrading control and safety systems, replacing aging equipment, doing extensive inspections on critical components, etc. Just because a reactor is 40+ years it doesn't mean it only conforms to safety standards from 40 years ago.
Yea but the bolts , Concrete and Metal beams are 40 years old 😂😂😂
@@Harrock and they would be inspected and replaced if needed. You do realize that some things last a long time, right?
The french reactors were checked by the EU. They were rated among the worst in europe and important stuff wasn't even checked because of pressure by the french government.
That is why I don't want any nuclear power in Germany. We would have to spend billions, it is just too expensive.
@@xenn4985 yes but often many nuclear reactors that try to renew their licence, often have to replace everything.
We shouldn't have rolling safety regulations. 1970s western nuclear power stations are already the safest form of energy on earth. More safety regulations just serve to increase costs and prevent the uptake of nuclear energy, increasing net harm.
Hi there - French-trained nuclear engineering graduate here. A great, balanced video as always. There was one detail that I think needs clarifying though. The cracking did not happen because the reactors were old. In fact, it happened in the younger, “N4” type reactors. In the case of the Penly-1 reactor (the one in which the crack you mentioned happened) the previous welds done beside the crack were likely improperly heat treated when done, leading to internal stress in the pipe, causing the crack. So case of bad workmanship and/or lack of quality control rather than ageing.
Well using numbers from well known anti nuclear think-tank lazard is not really balanced.
@@matsv201 "Fukushima was as bad as Chernobyl!" lol. This video is hysterical.
@@milo8425 yea.. that is not really compavle.
One side quite a few people died and 4000 acers of land made useless for multiplel decades.
The other hand, 0 people died and 2% of the ejaculated land remain useless 10 years later.
Out of curiosity, what is your salary? My mates a nuclear engineer on Royal Navy submarines and the salaries in the forces are pathetic. Interested to know what similar jobs pay in this field
@@milo8425 we can fuking spot radioactive fishswarms per satilet to this friggin day.....just becasue most of the shit ended in the sea instead over land doesnt make it one friggin bit less damaging....clown comment...
Small comment on the crack from a french welding engineer : it's not thermal fatigue, it's stress induced corrosion. It's a much more complicated topic !
But as someone that worked on the repairs, I can say that it's well under control, and just the fact that it was detected before being critical, it shows that the safety procedures are working
Good for France. Hope that you country is staying on top of repairs. Here in Japan about 20 years ago at a nuclear power plant in the west, a pipe burst scalding to death a worker. Has to be one of the most horrific ways to die. Keep safe.
That's a misunderstanding... that it was caught shows that a small part of the safety procedures are working. You don't know what you haven't caught, or isn't covered in the safety procedures because it is completely unknown, or ignored or neglected.
@@Andreas-gh6is yes and no.
Stress induced corrosion was not something that was suspected as "possible" here. It's because of a weird superposition of "coincidences" that it happened. But the procedures aren't necessarily about finding the causes.
They analysed every possible failure mode, and put in places controls to make sure that it wouldn't happen. For instance, here the failure mode is a rupture of the pipe. The procedure calls for visual, surface and volumetric controls to make sure the risk of the failure happening is minimal.
You can't plan for everything, yes. But you can think of all that could go wrong and prepare for this. And without this, the french nuclear authority would never have accepted the operation of nuclear reactors. Those guys are extremely strict, and not someone you're playing with.
They, by the way, have congratulated EDF for their response to this issue, and the "safety procedure are working" is le paraphrasing some of their conclusions
Th
Although I'm a pro-nuclear guy, and with all due respect toward you and your work Informattricks...
I really hate it when people involved claim "it actually proves safety procedures are working" in that case.
It's only partially true. It's mostly true, in my opinion. Still, it so close to be a lie, I would never let anyone say that.
First, it's a bare minimum for safety procedure to inspect and therefore detect unexpected failures. Claiming "see, it works" is VERY concerning, because we have MANY other examples where similar incidents weren't correctly addressed. They actually were kept so secret they in the end WEREN'T handled, or not correctly. People know that. They know the phrase to be a lie. Therefore, repeating the phrase which was a lie, in a context were it's only partially true, very wrong message.
Second, that particular failure is very serious! Yes, it's under control. But it still shouldn't have happened. Why did it happened? Many reasons, the loss of know-how being one of them, and probably the main. The answer is "need more money, more investment, in short, more nuclear" is probably the correct answer, but still very unsatisfying. Another big reason is... that safety procedures did NOT work until they did. Hence back to point one.
France is NOT exemplary. Yes, we had no Chernobyl, no Three mile Island, no Fukushima in France. It's not simply "luck", it's indeed because of quality work and choices. But Russians, Americans and Japanese aren't poor workers and unwise people. They are like us. People.
The very reasons why these major incidents occurred, we find them in France too. And despite the changes in regulation, despite the adaptation... we still find them.
Fission nuclear energy at his very core will ALWAYS be extremely nasty. That is a very efficient industry and very necessary one nowadays, but we shall always work with the idea in mind on "how to replace it. How to make sure we do not need that terrible thing anymore".
Like I said, I am a pro-nuclear guy. Thus to my opinion, yes, definitely, we need to build more reactors, we need to invest more in this energy, we need to train more people. But more importantly, we need to talk about every issue and answer every critics. For god sake, we have to stop over simplifying the problem.
To an extent yes, but overall nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to construct, run, and especially destruct. Nobody needs them for anything, with wind and solar being there for almost no money. In Germany, with German weather conditions, NPP kwh costs 6-8ct (until shutdown), solar 4ct, wind 2ct.
NPPs are useless, extremely dangerous and expensive monuments of the past.
"The reactor... has a cost of 8 million dollars per megawatt. While windturbines cost 1 to 2 million dollars per megawatt."
That is not a fair comparison. Nuclear can generate baseload since it is a dependable energy source. Wind is not. You need to add the cost for massive capacity battery storage to wind power before it can potentially fill the role of base load power generation. Same with solar. When you add battery cost, the price goes up sharply. If the tech is even already available for the capacity on the scale of a nuclear reactor.
Add in that nuclear gets much more economical the longer the reactor operates.
blades have shattered recently from harmonic vibration
@garyjohnstone6422 and you have to include the cost of disposal of the turbine and the environmental damage of disposal!!
Also worth factoring in the land / transmission costs.
Wind farms apparently need 300+ times the land area to generate the same amount of energy…and that is going to be so spaced out you’d need to invest in more transmission infrastructure
People are building water resovores to act as batteries and are cheaper and more long term and way safer. I think we just need a bit more motivation and with diversity will not need most dams or nuclear power plants except for nuclear weapons tritium has a short half life and cannot be made without nuclear power plants in any decent amounts.
Nuclear’s defamation may just be the greatest thing that the coal lobby has ever gotten through
When I read the title of the video, my first though was because Germany has massive coal deposits and the coal companies lobbied against nuclear energy. I wouldn't be surprised if the green party was started by the coal company.
Air pollution, acid rain, and burning coal releases heavy toxic & radiative metals and isotopes as NORM naturally occurring radioactive minerals // that ends up as metal oxides or fly ash that blows around everywhere like a continual Chernobyl accident // Coal is a toxic disaster and its best case is with clean coal gasification used as purified chemical feedstock to make methanol, DME, synthetic gasoline, diesel and jet fuels, lubricants and other petrochemical hydrocarbon and carbon molecules used widely in many industries. The heavy, toxic, radioactive and valuable metals present in tiny parts of the coal, can be recovered and commercialized to create additional profits and revenue to the clean gasification industrialized coal chemical feedstock creation.
Nuclear the safest and cleanest way to make negative carbon electricity, but not the cheapest, though other renewables cost more when energy storage added for 24/7 caseload uptime for Wind and Solar, since the storage capacity of energy storage needed to stabilize such sources costs more than over budget nuclear reactors.
Despite the fact the that the burning of coal produces 1,000x more nuclear fallout. The coal that's burnt isn't pure carbon, it's laced with a multitude of impurities, traces of nuclear isotopes and poisonous heavy metals are spewn in the air around coal plants.
@@CdrmnkNathan And impurities aside, even the perfect burning of coal is already very problematic by itself with the massive amounts of CO2 produced
@@TheNikoNik Trees and plants NEED CO2, if they stopped cutting every bloody tree they see in the Amazon, there would not be any issues, all this climate BS drives me nuts. I am in my late 60s and still remember all the articles in the 70s from the media that we were facing a new ice age, more BS that was all lies, certain individuals are making billions out of this climate change BS and as usual the stupid public listen to them rather than do research to see who the bad actors are making a fortune, and yes most politicians from various countries have their finger in the pie as it were.
Even if Europe stopped ALL use of carbon fuels it would make no difference, the biggest players in pollution are China America and India.
People tend to forget that Germany is one of the safest countries for nuclear Powerplants. No majpr environmental Problems (like Tsunamis). One of the highest Safety standarts in the world,... it just doesnt make sense for the "green" Party to shut the worlds most advanced nuclear Reactors while, 3km behind the French border, there is one of the oldest Nuclear plants in the World (Tihange) for ex.
The conservatives and liberals decided the shutdown.
The green just use this as a vehicle to create artificial scarcity, which makes an argument for rationing.
It's barely about the climate, it's mostly about redistribution.
I mean, they're not just burning coal, they're burning _lignite_ which apart from more CO2 per Watt energy produced, also gives off more nano particulate dust and other nasties than coal.
@@rey_nemaattori There is no artificial scarcity.
Germany burns less lignite....
@@rey_nemaattori no scarcity, energy production with lignite is going down even after leaving nuclear power and the final decision leaving nuclear power was made with the conservative CDU/CSU leading the government.
Actually, you got everything wrong, sorry.
It’s because the Green Party hate Germany and they want a weak Germany.
I also think that Russia is supporting the anti nuclear movement
>Calls itself green party
>Look inside
>Coal
A common misconception. Germany has reduced its coal use the past 30 years.
they are a joke, a bunch of clueless angry people, supported by the rest of the children of 1968, still on drug trips.
@@old-pete excluding asia, the world has reduced its coal use. saying germany did means nothing
@@lewis0705 It means erasmus is wrong.
@old-pete no it doesnt
Small correction: 0:43 The fallout spread on easterly winds, not westerly.
The wind's name is where it came from, not where it's going.
@@Yulo2000Leyjenimbys are destroying society
@@Yulo2000Leyje I do not think you realize how little waste is actually produced. It is not much. I highly recommend this guy, a energy professor. Ill even time stamp where he talks about how much is produced. /c1QmB5bW_WQ?t=1517
DAng it i always check comments before video, thanks
@@Yulo2000Leyjedo you know how much (or rather how little) nuclear waste is actually created?
@@beanapprentice1687 Depends on if you mean just the fuel pellets themselves or all the equipment, uniforms, PPE, etc that gets contaminated and has to be disposed of as well. Combine all that with the containment and protective shielding so it doesn't seep into groundwater for a long period of time, and it adds up.
There are theoretical plans of how to store it long-term, making tunnels underground that can then be backfilled and compartmentalized on the way out, for example. But getting approval and then building it is probably a long way out yet. Dumping at sea is a less legal option due to treaties not to do it anymore, despite it being the easiest, most cost-effective, and somewhat "safest" method (ocean floor is 3 miles down and it would be roughly concentrated in the dumping area, but there's still ocean life there as well as whatever drift you have from the currents).
One day the anti-nuclear folks will have to answer for setting us back in the fight for decarbonization.
Litterally.
Nuclear energy should be banned worldwide.
"Uhh, solar, uhh wind."
@@ACatLoversHandle FJB
Semper fi mofo
The worst part here is that Three Mile could hardly even be considered a disaster. A disaster in PR maybe, but nowhere near a nuclear disaster, yet had such a massive impact nonetheless.
A sorry coincidence with the China Syndrome being released to theaters, and the mainstream media went to town on them hyping the incident completely out of proportion
How was Three Mile Island not a disaster? That was a partial meltdown of the core, which damaged the reactor beyond repair. According to wikipedia, the cleanup lasted for 14 years and cost 1 billion US$, and obviously, the multi billion $ investment into the reactor were lost, too, after only three years of operation. It's not on par with Chernobyl or Fukushima, they really got lucky, but that's still a disaster, don't you think?
Yes, on the level of nuclear disasters, TMI would be ranked somewhere around the Joke level.
@@MatjesHunts Apologies, I should have clarified. I meant a disaster in relation to public health. Sure it was a financial disaster, but the situation did not actually pose much of a health risk to surrounding residents. I believe Kyle Hill recently made a video covering this recently.
I would consider it more of an nuclear "accident" than a disaster. That being said it still shouldn't have happened. It occurred due to bad early warning design, although the actual containment design worked alright since there was never actually a risk of an explosion. The only reason talk of a possible explosion ever took place was due to a miscalculation by the NRC.
@@beewyka819 Nuclear disasters are typically like that: very low deaths, very high financial cost. But if your core melts down, that is definitely a disaster.
Reminder that nuclear accidents are incredibly rare - there’s only really 3 nuclear power accidents in history and all 3 were mentioned in this video.
Meanwhile, coal power puts more radioactive particles into the air every year than all nuclear power plants in history.
Astaghfirullah
Not when you include Soviet/Russian submarines. Then you ad a second digit just for incidents on thier own. There are a lot of releases.
@@wotizitwat?
@@imjashingyou3461Russian navy should never count since they’re either built crappy or they are so badly taken care of it would bring any captain and admiral under court martial in the USN- the same navy that has reactors in both the Virginia class Submarine and almost every single aircraft carrier currently in Service without any damage or neglect to its reactors
Plus coal killed more people than three nuclear disasters combined
French here who's working in for EDF in a nuclear power plant. Few things to be said:
Firstly, the safety of french reactors is immensely better than any russian or Japanese technology. The technology involved is different and the AIEA (the independent nuclear control organism) imposes on us a lot of control even if the slightest non dangerous fault is detected. After Fukushima we had to improve all of our facilities' safety in regards to earthquakes and tsunamis eventhough the threat is basically non-existent in France
Secondly, you didn't mentioned how we ended up with an industry with a critical lack of investment. This was largely due to the European integration that imposed on us some ludicrous competition policies. EDF has to sell at a loss one third of its production to the competition. We are the only energy producer in France but we finance a flock of privately owned company who are supposed to develop their own production site, which they do not. So basically, we got the French taxpayer who paid for the construction of the powerplant, who subsidies private entities, and who buys to these company the electricity providing them a huge margin. This policy was pushed by Germany in order to get a European energy market where all of the competitive advantages of France have been nullified. It is a complete rip off
It was also Germany (and I think Greece, not really conversant on that) that opposed Brexit. As an American, you make it sound like they wanted to creste a gov't. external to and independent of every national gov't. in Europe, so they could afford to be more stubborn and intractable in the 21st Century than in the previous five.
I am overstating the situation, but I imagine not fabricating it from whole cloth.
Saying that your plants are safer than Japan's is an impressive claim, since Japan is supposed to have among the most modern 2nd-gen plants in the world.
@@HuntingTarg so to keep it simple, the plant of Fukushima Dai Ichi used some reactors built in the 70s, so not so new. Their technology is a reactor of "boiling water", meaning that basically their is only one cooling system, and that the coolant is on direct contact with the core of the reactor, so a single leak in that circuit leads to radioactive contamination.
The French technology is a reactor of "pressurised water". The coolant which is on contact with the core of the reactor never exist the confinement structure. There is a secondary and a tertiary cooling system that is not radioactive. That means that in the case of a fusion of the core, the Japanese system is dependent on their electrically powered pumps to inject water directly into the core of the reaction. In the French system you have some redundancies that allow us to operate some safety operation through the secondary and the tertiary cooling circuit, which limit the risk of critical failure of the entire system
@@HuntingTarg and you can add to that that the safety processes of the Japanese industry at the time was vastly exaggerated. TEPCO is a private company focuses on making a profit. They had two internal and one external audit that pointed out the risks of their system before 2011 but TEPCO didn't addressed the concerns. Safety is expensive
@@HuntingTarg oh and did I mentioned that in Fukushima the used nuclear fuel was stored in swimming pools located on top of the reactor? So when the pressure of the reactor had the confinement structure burst, all of the used nuclear materials were spread around the area
Closing down working plants that are not in immediate danger or in need of a service while at the same time approving open-pit coal mines to increase "energy independency," now that's progress right there.
Thats not whats happening. The area which is allowed to be mined for coal has been limited. And the limit has already been decreased. "Approving open-pit coal mines" bs.
@@hb3123 You can rephrase this to "approving coal burning power plants". It is still horrible and the opposite of progress.
Don't forget they not only got rid of clean energy (nuclear is cleaner than solar and wind and also safer too! believe it or not) but they also had to rely on importing energy from countries using nuclear and they had to import fossil fuels too! Leaps of progress have been achieved in germany.
Amortization far from completed and install useless renews.
"not in need of service"? You should get yourself more knowledge on this topic.
One of the things you missed, and I hope you cover in your next video, is that SMRs aren't just easily replaced because they're small, they're easily replaced because they are designed to be built and assembled in a factory, instead of being assembled in-situ.
They also use the fuel less efficiently and create even more waste issues than the large facilities though. And the Nuscale projects in the US are already falling apart as time to market and cost increased significantly.
@@BugMagnet You're right, the replaceable nature generates large volume of waste which hasn't been accounted for and requires new waste streams.
For reprocessing facilities, such as in the UK, there are large volumes of operational waste generated that currently do not have a waste stream or route. SMRs will have to be designed to meet future disposal requirements, or at least have decommissionable parts that can be easily decontaminated or size reduced for appropriate waste conditioning.
In the UK, this would have to meet acceptance criteria for the GDF as national strategy has shifted from spent fuel reprocessing. SMR manufacturers would probably also have to fund the various waste conditioning streams for the waste generated as a result of their products, as existing disposal options for LLW for example are restricted to existing operational large-scale plants and facilities.
Waste predictions and strategy through to 2135 published in the 3-yearly radioactive waste inventory report compiled by NWS (Nuclear Waste Services) do not include waste generated by additional waste streams such as SMRs that have yet to come to fruition.
@@BugMagnet The main reason nuclear reactors are inefficient is to avoid handling the fuel over non-proliferation concerns. With waste reprocessing fuel use can be much more complete. (Which means that the waste only needs to be stored for decades instead of millennia.)
It it very difficult to do waste reprocessing in a way the prevents nation states from diverting material to nuclear weapons. France is able to do it because they are one of the established nuclear powers.
@@jamesphillips2285 That is the advertisement I have heard a lot.
Upon looking into the topic of closed fuel cycles I found both the USA and France managed to build fast breeders that up fuel use by orders of magnitude. (closed fuel cycle instead of open fuel cycle) All those projects were then buried by their designers over the same issues of horrendous economics and poor reliability. Yes, it solves the waste proble, but actually using that technology is so expensive no one would ever want to do that.
Which brings the whole nuclear industry back to "lalalalala nothing bad will happen for a million years lalala"
The next attempt at this was supposed to be molten salt reactors. One was run in china and big surprise, molten salts eat through pipes.
As soon as someone manages to build a reactor that can produce affordable electricity with waste that only needs to be handles for one century, I will be all for it. But good luck competing with renewables that are dropping below 5ct/kwh all over the globe.
@@jamesphillips2285 This is an interesting one. I can only speak from experience in the UK, I don't have the means of knowledge elsewhere.
The UK, having reprocessed more spent nuclear fuel than the rest of the world combined, and that's at one plant in particular (there were two major reprocessing plants, THORP & Magnox.)
What made Magnox Reprocessing so successful was the natural enrichment of the Uranium metal fuel that compiled the Magnox fuel rod. This restricted the fissile content to some 0.8%. Magnox Reprocessing's chemical separation plant could use large scale stirrer tanks instead of smaller and restricted pulse columns of THORP, which were geometrically restricted in design to allow neutron leakage as such to prevent a criticality. The plants were designed to output similar quantities per year, but THORP's added complexity generated a multitude of technical problems during operation that ultimately led to an average output of just a third of its true capacity.
Reprocessing in the UK doesn't necessarily eliminate the length of time required to store the waste, it simply volume reduced it it (using the French AVM process actually) by diverting the fission fragments dissolved in the organic phase of chemical separation during reprocessing into highly active liquor, concentrating the liquor, storing it in HAST (highly active storage tanks) and mixing the evaporated calcined liquor into glass through its vitrification plant.
The concentrated nature of the fission products generate sizable quantities of heat output that require passive convection cooling for up to 40 years prior to any consideration of storage into the geological disposal facility, which it'll remain for the rest of days.
The PUREX chemistry allowed for large volumed of Plutonium waste to be generated, which the UK has the world's largest stockpile of, and no final plan for where this will be disposed of. Various plants are being constructed for the handling of these special nuclear materials to contain it for the short-medium term.
Ultimately, reprocessing whilst proven successful for the UK has been met with significant technical challenges and cost. Magnox Reprocessing held up better than THORP despite nearing 60 years in age as opposed to THORP's 25 years of operation, but the last fuel rod went through the charge machines last year, ending the UK's reprocessing programme. Further spent fuel will simply be held within storage ponds until the final disposal becomes available. It's simply cheaper than constructing a modern reprocessing facility with all the regulatory oversight that would inevitably delay its construction.
This doesn't consider the effluent wastes generated that require ion exchange or flocculation either, or grout encapsulated waste generated, such as sheared Magnox swarf from the fuel cladding.
Yeah, I notice how 'cheap' wind and solar is - especially when they are not producing any output, which is more often that people think, and 100 % backup of renewables is required mainly these days by CCGT gas turbines - which are the only things fast enough to keep up with the roller coaster unreliable output of renewables, and keep the lights on.
Output of solar and wind power plants can be accurately predicted 48h in advance, as soon as one has enough solar and wind power installed.
@@old-pete Then why is the weather forecast always wrong ?
@@chrissmith2114 The weather forecast is not always wrong.
Additionally the forecast is not for one region, but all regions. That is why I wrote one needs a certain amount of installations.
Forecasting the output of a single windturbine would be difficult.
@@old-pete The truth is that unreliable wind and solar need 100% backup from mainly quick reaction CCGT - UK is set to build at least 20 new CCGT stations in next few years. You have in Australia the madness of EV being charged from diesel powered generators. Solar in UK between October to march contributes very little to grid and then only a few hours per day. Just look at grass and trees in UK, they stop growing October and start again in March ( hint they use same 'power source' as solar panels ). Suggest you look a Sheffield University 'Gridwatch' site which graphically shows inputs to grid every 15 minutes, and has daily, weekly, monthly and annual graphs, just watch how often renewables do not turn up.
The output of solar is only zero at night at a national level.
The output of windturbines is not zero either. Gridwatch clearly shows that.
I think there is an error at 11:33 regarding the cracks found in French nuclear reactors. Error might be too strong a word but something important is missing:
While the cracks were indeed found, they were found on a backup security system which is meant to be used in order to inject water under high pressure to cool down the core in case of an emergency. This is by no mean something you should ignore and backup systems should be in perfect working condition because you want them to be working when you need them. Cracks were however not found on the primary circuit in which water circulates under normal operating conditions.
If your French is good enough, there is a lengthy parliamentary enquiry on this topic you can find on youtube,
Thank you for giving us the real information on the defects found at the plant. Fear mongering is common when it comes to talking about Nuclear Power and I'm not surprised that this wasn't as big a deal as the presenter made it sound like.
Also I find it troublesome that such a big commotion is made about the lack of certified nuclear vessel welders. This could be rectified by training programs in a matter of months. This is not an Astrophysics or Quantum Mechanics type of long term study. It takes proper instruction and hours and hours of practice (months of daily work), not 6 years of post graduate work. Pay them what they are worth and you will attract guys from all over the world to come there and do the necessary quality work. These types of certified welders are worth more than most Engineers. Just because they can't do the Calculus doesn't mean that they are not highly skilled and highly intelligent.
@@marscruz I completely agree.
@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist repent to my ass
There are welders but the number of hours they can work in this part of the reactor has an annual maximum set by law. That said, experienced welders are in high demand and there are not enough of them. However, this is a common problem for all manufacturing industries.
@@julientabulazero103
This does not apply to the construction process. Only to maintenance and repairs.
What I don't understand is how the France of the 1970's was able to construct all these reactors that have apparently performed quite well, yet modern day France seems unable to equal even a fraction of these past accomplishments. It's also quite baffling that France would go all in on nuclear power and then completely abandon it so quickly, these potential problems should have been quite obvious.
because of politics. The French green party is in part financed and influenced by the German green party who is using German taxpayer money to spread its anti-nuclear ideology in neighbouring countries.
We have lost the "savoir faire", that's mean that we don t have anymore enought engineer or expert il fonction. We simply lose our knowledge by not contructing new site for more than 40 years. Also now security has way more hight standards, that's means more cost and even more technicals needs to construction.
Liberalism is a hell of a disease
Le left is a cancer for France DE Gaulle was the last true leader
Politics.
Nuclear energy had bad reputation for too long, politics decided to go against it for too long, and we lost the knowledge.
=> Oh Fukushima: let's decommission every nuclear plant. Oh no more gas: let's build more nuclear plants. etc. Baffling as you said.
I was extremely into environmentalism even from when I was young, and the opposition of major green parties, environmental groups etc to nuclear power was always the thing that confused me the most. Sure, once I learned about Chernobyl I was scared of nuclear fallout and treated nuclear sources with the respect they deserve, but it seemed so strange to want to ban that entire form of power generation when thousands and thousands of people die every year of coal mining related injuries and illnesses and we were acknowledging that we had to use less fossil fuel.
Well the nuclear waste isnt so nice for the people either
renewables exist...
@@Zwiebel4stop for a moment to think about those statements. If renewables only was cheaper, Germany/Denmark should have cheaper power than France /Sweden who use a lot of nuclear. But they aren’t. Ask why, and you’ll see the flaws in the math. Highly recommend podcasts by Chris Keefer and Robert Bruce, substack by Doomberg that cover the data in detail.
@@rubenwillmarth9731 There is a lot more to installing renewables than just the cost. Wind is incredibly cheap. It has become the cheapest form of power generation today.
The reason why we don't have more of it is simply because political reasons and the required distance to inhabited areas prevent energy companies from building more.
This is always the same folly of waging war on symptoms instead of working on human (spiritual) progress. Thus the ugly power tripping we see where the German Green Party is one of the biggest ruiners of the environment. Because their motivations aren't authentic, they serve the US empire.
You forget one important point: france colonization of Africa allowed them to get Uranium easily, stable enough to invest in 50 year plants, and at dirt cheap prices.
And bomb material production is part of France's nuclear economy.
One Problem of re-stating nuclear power in germany: There's noone to work at those reactors. The old guys are entering their pensions now or work to safely dispose of the old reactors. Since everybody thought the exit was coming, there are no universities teaching nuclear engineering etc. anymore. We lost the know-how. Not to mention the general lack of workers in this country...
DTU (Technical University of Denmark) just started teaching the physics and engineering of nuclear power plants again. I also bet some of the old guys could be persuaded out of retirement -- just like old COBOL programmers were up to Y2K.
It's a problem that can be solved easily (and quickly) as soon as the regulatory climate in Germany turns for the better.
@@mitropoulosilias we ain't importing nuclear scientists, we are mostly importing labour to fill positions in healthcare, construction etc.
So positions which don't get filled by Germans themselves.
And yes the tax burden is a problem, but mostly because it doesn't get reinvested correctly due to inefficient buocracy
If a problem can be solved with money, it's not a problem
The needed craft should be generalized ... to something like "Mission Critical Safety Systems Engineering" or "Dangerous Technical Processes Management", not specific to nuclear technology only. There will always be need for such expertise profile and good money in their careers. Also the problem of lost knowledge is unacceptable in age of information, it is clearly lack of law-mandated procedures for knowledge management in place and nonexistence of national (and international) infrastructures for retaining such important documentation.
Amazing nuclear ever happened in the first place since it had never been done before and there was no one with experience and no universities teaching it!
I feel an immense amount of dread every time I remember the nuclear shutdowns and reinstating of Russian gas and very dangerous brown coal plants, as a German.
Modern fission power plants do not have the same risks as those ones. Fission technology is actually thousands of times safer than fossil fuel power plants. You do know burning coal, oil, and natural gas releases toxins like FUCKING MERCURY into the air that we end up breathing in, yeah? Modern fission plants are specifically designed so that if they have a problem, they do NOT explode. The only reason Fukushima turned into such a disaster is because the plant's owners didn't want to spend money to protect it from tsunamis, even after the government said they should. The only reason anyone would ever have reason to fear nuclear power is ignorance and emotional bias.
I get the same amount of dread when i google maps germany and look at the open slag pits. They have destroyed large parts of their country with coal mining and let people that don't understand nuclear energy scare politicians away from it.
@@NOBODY-oq1xr1. It's nowhere near inevitable
2. Modern plants are extremely safe even if several steps go extremely wrong, even if a meltdown does happen, modern containment structures make it practically a non issue, even Fukushima had 0 recorded deaths for example
Chernobyl was _the_ example of extreme danger in shoddy, unsafe design. This is not the case for any nuclear power plant in Germany, France, the US, Japan or even Australia (yes Australia has a nuclear power plant - it is for producing radioactive isotopes for medicine rather than for generating electricity, but still, it's there).
@@jiminverness I'm pretty sure the spiders have gotten hold of those isotopes
It’s crazy that the two greatest nuclear disasters were caused by utter incompetence and cataclysmic natural disasters. And then that every other nuclear disaster had a higher death rate by suicide than by cancer and radiation sickness
Wizard, plus Fukushima put a nuke plant on a shoreline where earthquakes and tsunamis happen …. that’s poor planning.
@@stevesherman1743 Other nuclear power plants on the coast got hit just as hard, but didn't suffer any meltdowns. It wasn't the location of Fukushima Daiichi, but rather the fact that they didn't build a sea-wall appropriate for the location, ignored advice on locating emergency generators high up and didn't provide enough isolation for safety systems located in the basement.
There was also incompetence too, as the engineers had neglected their responsibilities to test safety systems. Meaning they had no idea if the ICs were functioning, since they didn't actually know what operational ICs look like.
All nuclear disasters are caused by incompetence. That should tell you us humans are just too incompetent to run this safely. Let's just go with wind and solar instead. It's even greener, no toxic waste and can't blow up.
@@stevesherman1743 Fukushima was exactly extremely good planning. Oh yeah ask the Real Engineer here so can explain it to you.
@@stevesherman1743 Fukushima earthquake or tsunami could have done nothing, but a catastrophic "human error" was made - during the design, the location of the emergency generators was changed in the halls at sea level where they were flooded and they should have been several floors higher - at the level of the access road to the power plant, there was no emergency power supply led to an explosion of hydrogen which could not be removed in the reactor buildings without power
France is like that one team member that does 70% of the presentation and Germany is the person who says "mhm I'll get around to it" and never does.
France literally got Germans killed "defending" uranium supply chains, this isn't even funny.
The 2009 plans (Atom-Austieg )Merkel dismantled (Atom-Austieg-Austieg) before backtracking in the most stupid way (Atom-Austieg-Austieg-Austieg) actually build 80% of the current renewal capacity in 5 years (given the 15 years that passed and over 50% renewable coverage, I'd assume we'd be in a much lower carbon position on the original plans).
Germany is rather the one spending money to not do it
@@theplayerofus319
Renewables are a lot colder and 5 states exceeding their needs in renewable production should reassure the failures further south that 2009 policy would have served them.
I don't know where you saw that "nuclear reactors typically have a lifespan between 20 to 40 years". Pretty much every commercial design is designed to last *at least* 40 years.
As for the corrosion crisis, had you checked on your spreadsheet, you would have noticed that it typically affected *newer* reactors. The affected pipes were emergency circuits, meaning they couldn't have burst at *any moment* as you claim, but only if safety injection was used. That's a big problem for sure, but it was not the ticking bomb your phrasing implies.
Sorry, but I think you could've spent a little more time researching the subject, especially as an engineering channel which should have the skills required for a more in-depth understanding of the issue. As it stands, your video ends up making erroneous statements regarding the causes and consequences of this crisis.
RE is only an "Engineering channel" in the loosest sense, they often have only a shallow understanding of the topics they talk about.
That is a fair assessment of the video. Some of the comments provide far more factual data. I also enjoy how he glosses over the fact that solar and wind require standby sources to maintain the grid. By definition, that standby source CANNOT be solar or wind. France has it right and China is actually building more nuclear power plants than ANY country on the planet.
@@Joe-xq3zuscience enthusiast vs scientist
Real engineering has a bias against nuclear, i don't know why, but it is very obvious when you watch multiples videos in which he talk about nuclear energy. He will only present part of the facts. brush off the politics around them and just get to the conclusion that nuclear energy isn't worth it, look at this video Germany the most industrialized and wealthy country in Europe is emitting massive amounts of CO2 and they are injecting billions of euros to transition to renewable energy, but still failing, the conclusion of the video is that France is a ticking bomb while exporting electricity and trying to modernize their nuclear power plants.
It's ludicrous coming from someone who is usually rational.
You have to realize that people who advocate for solar and wind are liars. Everything they say about nuclear, gas, solar and wind are a pack of lies.
He's not just "wrong," he is deliberately misleading his audience.
4:41 For everyone who is confused by the solar energy in France from 2PM to 3AM, the x-axis does not show the time, it shows the past 24 hours, so it begins somethere during a summer afternoon.
You make very good and well researched videos.
Yes, it was clearly labelled as such. But it would be more intuitive if the hours were aligned with the clock, or make it obvious, by showing, say, 30 hours.
Not only that. Germany is under green dictatorship, where loud mouth and emotions overpowering science and logic.
> "This is what a day looks like in France"
> TIME (PAST 24-HOURS)
> 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24
Who could have possibly thought that it _wasn't_ for a day
@@williamstucke5445 what you are asking for is to have statistics and graphs that are not made to mislead you or trick you into believing in a bias. This was clearly done on purpose.
Thanks I was also wondering why this was presented with that stupid time axis.
Im a MechEng student, and just took a discipline about piping engineering. The teacher lecturing worked on one company that built some of France's and Belgium's Nuclear Power plants.
Pipe fatigue and stress rates and cycles are thoroughly studied and are easily measurable. Pipe maintenance should be the top priority in maintenance plans. If the responsible entity let the pipes crack to breaking point, they are slacking, and may be acountable for millions of deaths
Are you studying at a trade school?
@@danhobart4009 Engineering is not a trade.
@@douganderson7002 Where did you read a "uhm ahkshuallly"? You ok, fam?
@@douganderson7002what do you consider strongly related? International law? Maybe contemporary dance...
@@Derzull2468 In some countries you can study through a trade school and get a BTech engineering degree with a government ticket.
The increased cost of Nuclear power isnt the result of increased safety measures, but rather an monumental lack of investment in the nuclear sector after the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters.
One of the ways this has manifested is the complete lack of experience and expertise in the industry, especially around building these plants. Believe it or not, the first nuclear plants built in the early nuclear age were also incredibly expensive and over budget/time. However, these costs and unexpected failures were reduced, in part by building tens of these in a short time span, allowing for the spread and building of shared knowledge and expertise, in both the labour force building them and the institutional knowledge shared between engineers and project lead, but the baseline expertise was also higher at the time, since this was an era that already had massive investment in energy, technology, and infrastructure.
Great video, as always. Just a few things I'd like to add :
1) There is currently a massive overhaul of the older reactors, known as "Grand Carénage". The objective is to get on the same level of safety as the newest plant, the EPR2, by heavily upgrading almost every aspect of the process : a new "tub" to collect corium is being added, all the piping and hvac systems are being checked to be sure it'd resist a massive earthquake, all the cableways are reinforced, and so on and so forth. The main goal is to be able to push the reactor to 60 years, and perhaps even beyond that, while maintaining safety standards among the best in the world.
2) FLA3, or the new EPR being build in Flamanville, costs discrepency mainly comes from a policial issue : all the others reactors are made in pairs, which allows for a much better "scale effect" than building one reactor after the other. For exemple, if you are stuck on a problem while building the first reactor, you can use the knowledge to modify the second one while building it, and in the end you'll end up with 2 reactors in less time that it would take you to only build one.
3) FES, the nuclear plant of Fessenheim in France, was closed ahead of its time because of political pressure by Germany and Switzerland. This was a huge blow to EDF economy during the corrosion episode, and is still something that is resented in France
(I work in the field in France, all the views above are mine and not my company's).
And Fessenheim was indeed a disgrace and disregard of security concerns of your Eastern neighbours. Nothing wrong with putting NPPs on solid streams, but doing it downwind and away from your major economic hubs is quite telling how little you care about your neighbours.
Flamanville: Be honest about the total cost of construction as assessed by the Cour des Comptes, probably the least biased numbers one can get on such a project. That, Hinkley Point C and Olkiluoto cost overruns are abysmal.
And just for the record, I never was against NPPs and lived 3 km from one (Leibstadt) for two years.
I'd be very interested to know what you would think about Ireland building a small number of nuclear reactors
Point 2 is total bullshit and wishful thinking. It makes no sense, and the lack of results just confirms it.
@@fan2hd277 Well, economy of scales are there - in theory. But if their goal of 3 billion is multiplied on the first attempt, how much better they'd do for number 2 is quite speculative.
@@michaeljhonfarrar Would be a waste, if you look at a) their needs and b) their wind potential.
As someone working in the nuclear field, the video is very accurate about the importance of continued focus on nuclear. After a 30 year of neglect, it can be extremely difficult to continue operating and constructing nuclear plants.
Nuclear benefits from scale and society knowledge. Both Germany's plan and France's plan are good. Full nuclear or zero nuclear are best. The lukewarm commitment is the most expensive and least beneficial. As the workforce gains knowledge and designs are standardized, additional nuclear plants shouldn't be vastly over budget.
Yeah this is the thing everyone seems to miss, if you do not already have a huge domestic nuclear energy industry it is just not feasable to run on nuclear and if you have to choose wether to build a renewables or a nuclear based energy solution then nuclear is just to slow to get started.
Why full nuclear or no nuclear?
You can have less plants but you just have to commit to a cycle of building a new one while decommissioning older ones.
Pardon my ignorance, i don't have a engineer degree, but this kind of reasoning feels like a non sequitur: "we don't build nuclear power plants because we don't build nuclear power plants". If the objective we have is to reach net zero in 2050 (enough time to build quite enough reactors I THINK?), at least now i don't see any other way to cover the base load that intermittent renewables leave uncovered. Couldn't we plan to import expertise from other countries like France?
@@piethein4355The most beautiful thing about all of this is that "renewables" are not 100% good for the environment, nor better than nuclear energy, the wind itself increases the local temperature, because it decreases the kinetic energy of the wind, reducing its range and efficiency in absorbing the thermal energy of the place, in addition to preventing the moisture from the sea from reaching the center of the larger continents. 100% nuclear is definitely the best, in every way, it's greener, cheaper, produces more energy and produces less waste.
@@fabianodendrella5526 If I remember correctly, California in the US and Australia faced some blackouts for betting too much on renewables like solar panels and wind.
You missed one major fact. Germany was to be considered main battlefield in cold war times. People were not only against nuclear power but nuclear weapons, too. And both are related at least in mind.
From a practical perspective. Think of captain Schettino or pilot Lubitz running a nuclear power plant as chief engineer. You will only know after something is getting wrong.
This is the context I was missing! Thank you. I finished the video and was left with the question "But... WHY?".
In that case, the threat of nuclear exchange makes any threat posed by nuclear reactors negligible...
@@jamesmccurdy The video was only about presenting nuclear power as good and not about illuminating why Germany is against it. It was also full of mistakes, like France being a net exporter and Germany importing electricity from France. Germany has been a net exporter of electricity on an annual basis for many years. And the people in Germany have been demanding the development of renewable energies since the 80s, but the corrupt CDU has made many criminal deals with the coal industry and systematically destroyed e.g. the German solar industry, which was the world market leader. Over the decades, there have been many very big scandals around the topic of nuclear power and final storage, a lot of police violence during protests (see "Castor transports"), lies, deception, lack of transparency, corruption. Simply a lot of things that have stuck in people's heads over several generations. All this was not illuminated at all and everything was simply presented as if the Greens had no concept and as if Germans were just scaredy-cats without a plan.
A good point, especially relevant today, as in, July 4th 2023. There have been reports of Russia planting bombs at the Zaporizhzhia NPP that is under their control and the Ukraine government claims to have knowledge of the Russians telling the civil work force to clear the NPP by tomorrow. They have made threats to blow it up already, let's hope it is just threats.
What a ridiculous take..
France did not fight to label natural gaz as green. Germany did that.
France could have to make Germany happy so Germany would approve nuclear power plants in return
Not "Germany" but the greens!
French here, yes France did, in hope Germany would then consider nuclear green too.
Guess what happened? 😂
Out of both parties did. Why are you straight up lying?
Natural gas (methane, specifically) can be green depending on how it's sourced. The method of extracting methane from CO2 under the presence of a catalyst are well understand, we just haven't been be able to figure out how to do it yet.
That is the best way to deal the climate change that has already happened: literally sucking extra carbon dioxide outside of the air and turning it into fuel
15:05 This is the exact reason we had so much underinvestment for years, French politicians basically said the exact same thing and first wanted to reduce France's nuclear share of electricity generation to 50% of our electricity grid.
France's issue is also down to its red tape, Finland has the same EPRs 2 and they just launched their first one.
Yea Finland does. And the reactor was started operation over 10 years late. There were a lot of issues. I remeber at least one was that a French company supplying critical components went bankrupt. And the reactor itself was compleatly new desing and would have been at the the originally planned date of completion of 2009 been the largest nuclear reactor in Europe or even the World.
Why would you bring up the Finnish EPR as an argument? That reactor was also decades behind schedule and billions of euro over budget
@@jokuvaan5175 Yes, the reactor started operation severely late and over budget, but large part of that is because the knowhow of building nuclear power plants has been lost. Some delays were because:
-Areva (the French company in charge for building the power plant) was not at all familiar with the Finnish authorities, who actually wants to see and inspect fabrication and quality control plans for critical components before their fabrication can begin. (=Inexperience with Finnish authorities)
-Areva had previously only supplied the reactor, not the entire powerplant. They effectively jumped in to a huge construction project with little to no experience.
-The people who were involved with building the currently operating nuclear plants did it in the 70's and 80's. Skilled and experienced people in this field have retired a long time ago.
-The design was new, which quite understandably caused delays both in design and fabrication phases. For example, some critical components were made 2 or 3 times to reach the required quality level with the selected fabrication methods.
-Key personell in TVO (the organization who bought the reactor) had no relevant experience in managing large construction projects.
-Safety requirements have become much more strict since the previous projects, requiring the design and implementation of new safety systems or redesign of old systems.
If a similar project was to happen within the next few years, there would likely be far fewer delays and cost overruns. First of all, the companies and key personell involved have gained experience in design and management of large construction project. The new design has been built, new fabrication methods have been tested and improved. Some design issues have been solved. Companies have gained experience working with the authorities and each other.
@@andersvj Because it was also a pilot reactor (so going over budget is expected just like in any industrial pilot programme). Now that it works and that most of the required knowledge has been acquired, building the following reactors will be both faster and cheaper.
Actually no, the exact reason is Germany hates seeing France with the nuclear advantage, so they lobbied directly and via the EU to bury France's nuclear program. And now they're like "oh look, it's dangerous because it's not maintained enough". Yeah right, it's not maintained enough because they requested it to be abandoned.
As a german, I feel like I have to add a few points here:
1. The decisions made around Nuclear Energy are unfortunately more politically motivated than based on the actual power-grid needs. Until around 10 years ago, Germany used to invest heavily into Solar Power, encouraging installments on residental homes.
Due to political reasons (& heavy lobbying from the coal industry) the CDU-lead coalition axed most of the subsidizations and partially banned residental homes from adding power to the grid. These political changes also lead to Chinese manufacturers quickly overtaking the previously pretty strong german solar industry.
2. A big part of the debate about Nuclear Power is around the storage of the waste - a topic that's unfortunately missing here. We had some accidents with salt water damaging nuclear waste barrels, which lead to people protesting against having waste in their area. To this date, we still haven't found a suitable non-temporary storage solution ("Endlager").
Funnily enough, the state of Bavaria is one of the biggest supporters of Nuclear Power, but refuses to accept new power plants built and waste being stored in bavaria.
You do realize that you can recycle nuclear waste and reuse it as nuclear fuel, right? You don't have to store it at all. The nuclear waste can be reused many times before it fully decays.
In the end, the problem comes down to cost, not technology.
The way I’ve seen is basically digging a deep hole into the ground. Keeps it away from life, and it doesn’t move much… just needs to be away from water reservoirs.
Nuclear waste, the Kind regularly produced, is either a radioactive concrete molded into a cylinder, or equipment used by people which I don’t see why they couldn’t do the same with.
@@johnnk3256Also the nuclear waste problem has been long solved with the new technologies. It is way safer to use some underground land to store nuclear waste in your town compared to breathe fossil fuel combustion gases
@@johnnk3256 This doesn't solve the problem, it just delays it...
@@felixw19: Nope it solves it. Recycling nuclear waste brings down the decay time from hundreds of years down to two decades. Which is more than manageable. Not just that, each time you recycle, the volume of the waste also goes down. We've had this technology for like 20 years now.
remember burning lignite also emits radioactive particals in the air.
A nuclear plant contains its nuclear radiation, but a lignite plant trows all its nuclear radiation in the air
we need to compare radioactive decay profiles for both technologies
And nobodey is burning more coal...
Why does this bullshit argument always come up?
The only time Germany had to shorty increase the ammount of coal being burned was last year....because Germany had to overproduce a lot of electricity short term do to a) gas price exploding and gas security in question do to the russian invasion and b) France fucking up their nuclear power plants and needing a lot of imports
Literally without german coal France would have had a bad suprise last year. France and Germany were literally trading gas and caol because germany needed non russian gas for heating in the winter while france needed coal electricity to keep the lights on.
Since then coal has again been on a decline in Germany with renewables being (finally) build faster then under the previous gouvernmeant.
Also its a funny myth in general that people outside of germany think back when germany had more nuclear power palnts were werent still burning shitloads of lignite coal. The share of coal was bigger then today back during germanys pro nuclear times because it was simply cheaper then building more NPPs. The nuclear phase out in Germany (sadly) didnt really replace much coal and gas yet because what happened was that nuclear was replaced by renewables as share of the energy production. This was mainly do to the last gouvernmeant under Merkel being absolute coal and nuclear loving shitheads. They killed germanys renewable industry and refused to phase out coal do to "the jobs".
Originally in 2000 when Germany started the phase out of nuclear there was a very simple and logical plan: build up renewables while phasing out coal and nuclear slowly over 20 years. The cosnervatives simply forgot about the "build renewables" part. For a stop gap measure russian gas was supposed to be sued because it could function as a very flexible base load with renewables until alternatives would be build (or gas turbines modified to use hydrogen gas). Gas turbines have the advantage that you only have to turn them on when it is needed and you can turn them of basically immediatly again unlike coal plants or nuclear energy. However, that also wnet to shit under the last gouvernmeant who decided to go full on russian gas instead of using it as a stop gap measure during transition.
And now both Germany and France are fucked because they fucked up both their strategies the last 20 years and the internet debattes which was the "better" desaster :D
100%, and no one mentions that.
And then also the ridiculous high CO2 emissions and the insanely large open pits to mine the coal ....
As a German I hate the anti nuclear sentiment in our country....
@@BetaD_ Open pits that destroy your countryside, no less.
Nuclear never "powered the country."It had 30% at some point
Very important factor to bring about: Coal is the MAIN emiter of radioactive material to the nature; air, soil and water. Thats because all soil have some radioactive material mixed in. Mining is a really insuring way to actually pull radioactive soil from earth and spreading it all over.
And the green party in germany is advcating for renewable energy sources while having their stocks solely in fossil fuel companies 🤡
Never heard of that. What are your sources for this, may I ask?
@CheapSushi it's not that I'm aware of the fact that dirt is slightly radioactive. But the claim that coal is allegedly the main emitter of radioactive material is new to me. I've been on countless discussions and heard every talking point, but this was never mentioned. I live in Germany. Funny how this isn't something worth mentioning.
So, yes: I still like to know the sources for that claim.
So I just looked it up and the reporting in Germany is NOT good about this. I've read briefly about modern filters, but also about certain studies on the surrounding environment of coal power plants. I need to do some digging.
Thanks for informing.
Coal is a main emiter now. But in case something gets wrong with nuclear wast storage, the situation completely changes. Germany already made its negative experiences with nuclear wast in underground storages that almost contaminated groundwater. This is the reason why people are concerned about nuclear power.
Nuclear reactors are like bridges. Big expensive. But their supposed to be reliable. The reactor should work from the time you were born until you have a midlife crisis. Much like bridges tho. They’re grossly underfunded. And a lot have hit that midlife moment. But nuclear reactors are permanent infrastructure. You have to have the cooling ponds. The on-site storage, the millions of miles of copper. Shutting down nuclear is the antithesis to the green energy future we deserve. Another thing. Is that nuclear is the only power source with an energy density to make extraterrestrial mining even the slightest bit worth it. Trust me when I say, that if they find uranium in the astroid belt it’ll be gone faster than you can say Chernobyl.
There is no green energy. Asteroid belt is full of everything. Still very hard to get it home
They're only expensive when they're overregulated.
I know it was part of a sponsor plug, but from an ex-engineering student, the advice at the end was bang on, particularly if you take Python a step further and learn how to use anaconda virtual environments, notebooks (google colab, jupyter, ipython, etc...), numpy, scipy (especially optimize and integrate) , pandas, matplotlib/seaborn, etc... I had to do a hard pivot two months into my undergrad dissertation because my original plan wasn't working, because I already knew Python and the above libraries from previous work I was able to apply the research I had already completed and quickly write and debug a program to automate nuclear fuel geometry design, which saved my degree. I also used Python and the above packages extensively in my MSc to write a hypersonic flow solver for basic geometries in just a week or two. Even just knowing the basics goes a long way, I recently used my knowledge of Python to write an Excel macro in TypeScript, a language I'd never used before, that automated data scraping from spreadsheets that would have otherwise taken a team of people weeks, saving a project that needed that data to inform a decision from going over its deadline.
The very least i expected is seeing a comment about a programming language and its libraries when clicking on this video that talks about nuclear power and politics to some degree lmao
I'm an AI engineer and I approve this message
16:32 for reference
I've been avoiding python because of some issues I have with it (main one being speed) but Now that Mojo is coming out I'll be going back to it but will most likely modify it to have syntax I prefer like brackets instead of indents and changing some keywords to match go syntax.
Python couldn't have had a better endorsement. In the past, I've had skirmishes with Fortran, PL/1, Basic and C. You've kindled the interest of an old retired guy.
10:15 the 20-40 years referenced is the initial licensing period in most countries. Most plants will last at least 2x the licensing period, and many will last 3x or more. Most of those are plants that need inspection and refurbishment. They almost definitely aren't decommissioning unless they were under designed and/or poorly maintained.
As a german, i say its wrong to completely phase out nuclear fission power. Using the old existing reactors to increase the time we have to shift to better alternatives is WAY better. The german reactors are for the most part at end of their expected lifespan, but that is no reason to simply shut them down all at once. They were phased out bit by bit, but still way faster than they shouldve, and the investment in alternatives hasnt facilitated this kind of process.
There is no question, that increasing the use of coal powerplants is hipocracy in regards to the plans for "carbon neutrality". The accidents of chernobyl and fukishima were two very specific incidents where there was alot of human error involved. Thats not to say, that this couldnt happen somewhere else in the world, but the fact remains, that the biggest actual issues with nuclear power, are humans and radioactive waste.
as a german i can say, that you are wrong. Only 5% of the electricity was produced from nuclear energy in 2021. And now we have 46% renewables, in 2021 we had only 41%. Nuclear Energy is very stupid. 3 Generations are making a big nuclear party and 3000 Generations have to take care of the waste. When you think that only 10% of the world energy comes from NPP
@@alexanderdekeuyper2990 "it's a good thing to force a whole industry out of fossil and nuclear powerplants" And what magical energy source are you going to replace that with, if you're also not investing enough in solar/wind/hydro yet? Seems like this all was a lot more about fossil fuel industry not wanting to lose money, than about any actual good reasons. Coal plants have killed more people than all the nuclear disasters combined, many times over. And if unfiltered, also emit radioactive particles just out into the surrounding air. Face it, it's just dumb, reactionary fear-mongering that led you Germans to this point.
German industry HEAVILY leans on cheap energy. This could send Germany into a deep economic crisis. Do you know? Does the EU have rules to follow about nuclear in regards to adjoining nations? I mean, France could build it's reactors very close to the German border, and with prevailing winds, Germany could be the biggest victim in France's (theoretical) reactor meltdown.
It is shameful how much more grams of CO2/KWh Germany emits than France does.
@@alexanderdekeuyper2990 It is shameful how much more grams of CO2/KWh Germany emits than France does.
One of the most important factors that nobody seems to be talking about when it comes to nuclear power, is the production infrastructure for them, or rather, the lack there of.
What I mean by this is essentially the fact that so few nuclear reactors are being built in the world, that there isn't really any efficient mass production for their parts.
This also means that if, for example, every country in the world would start building at least one nuclear reactor every year, the market for their components would become so lucrative that the components themselves would see massively reduced prices compared to right now.
Not to mention the boon to the research and development sectors for nuclear power, and for standardization.
Even then, it's not really mass production. It's not massive to produce something 200 times per year. Sure, maybe there are small improvements with producing them in bigger amounts, but not mass production. Not like solar whose price dropped by 89% between 2009 and 2019. From $359/MWh to $40/MWh. It's about $30/MWh now. While electricity from a new nuclear power plant costs about $155/MWh. The price of Li-Io batteries has fallen by similar rates and wind, solar and battery are together now cheaper than nuclear energy. And they get cheaper every year. Nuclear would have to become much cheaper in a short period of time. I don't think that's realistic. Especially as if we would match our energy demand 100% with nuclear uranium sources would be empty within 10 years. With current demand we have 200 years but the more we use it, the faster it's gone. Alternatives are not ready jet. Maybe we could find new uranium sources, but it would make it more expensive.
But Germany had them already
That's what has happened in China. Their supply chain is well developed and they have the cost of a nuclear reactor down to US$2.6B per GW. Construction time is usually under 5 years. Note that these reactors are built with IAEA oversight and must meet the IAEA safety regulations. South Korea are down to around US$4.5B per GW. Once supply lines are established in Europe, costs will similarly reduce.
@@kevinpaine7893 well, China might fulfill safety standards of the reactor (where I still think we would want to have them even safer), what China is not fulfilling is constructin sight safety.
@@Duconi Please provide a source on the 10 years. That seems wildly unrealistic. Afaik we have 10s of thousands of years of uranium not 10s of years.
i have another thing to comment on: the part where you said a nuclear power plant has a life expectancy of 20 to 40 years i think is wrong because thats just the amount of time before the license for a power plant has to be renewed and repairs have to be made.
I personally believe in Thoriumreactors, it is a concept that the UK already practiced with and the Netherlands is going to build a couple reactors that use this.
It sounds nice but isnt a solution nobody was able to scale it up or make it a economic option.
Befor we have thoriumreactors we also should have fusion reactors. I just would not wait for them.
France being an importer of electricity in 2022 is a historical first. Especially ironic as it happens at a time when French industry is minimal having been methodically destroyed over the past 40 years. The 2022 situation should have been inconceivable as the electricity issue had been solved brilliantly decades ago when France still had builders. The only causes of that sad state of affairs have to do with selling out to foreign or corporate interests, incompetence, ideological blindness and overall treason of the national interest on the part of the current French elites.
...
Wasn't another major reason climate change? Because of the drought, the rivers needed to cool all those nuclear plants got too warm, so the power plants couldn't operate at full capacity.
One reason was also that water levels were too low, or the water was already too hot to properly cool the reactors. Renewables don't have that problem and don't need a base load. PV and Wind are very complimentary. With smart vehicle charging, boilers that make the water hot when there is a lot of renewable production you can cut your storage needs way down.
If you have nuclear reactors, it makes sense to keep them running until you replaced more polluting energy production with renewables. Germany killed its renewable industry a year after deciding that nuclear is being faced out, like they decided decades before. They could have a grid made up of >90% renewables by now, but the politicians loved coal money more.
@@togamid No, i love how people like you spread lies without even checking.
@@Adrian-jn9ov Its not possible to run the european energy grid with renewables alone. This would only be possible with extensive battery storages (which are still problematic from a enviromental perspective), and the renewable energy production capacity has to be much higher than in a compareble grid with a high base production. Relying on EVs as energy storage might be a very risky strategy, because you have to hope that there are enough EVs with full batteries plugged in, and you basically have to force the people to buy a certain amount of cars. This strategy is not compatible with the goals to reduce car usage in cities for example. You can also not drain those EVs completely empty, because people would not participate in such a system when its possible that they want to go to work and then notice that theri cars are at 3%.
Its not useful to look at the grids of individual countries. Europe has one large grid and national grids cannot fuction independent. It makes no sense to replace all fossil energy production in a single country with renewables, the production in all countries has to be replaces. Its highly unrealistic that the EU can run a 90%+ renewable grid, at least not with current technology.
Germany did not only kill its renewable and nuclear power productuin, they also killed their coal plants. Germanys only hope is that the other european countries wont do the same mistake, otherwise they are fucked.
I went to the largest pit mine in Germany on a school trip as a kid, it was insanely large and destructive, the huge on-site tracks for coal and the monstrous excavators were cool to see but even 25 years later I still remember the scale of it all. There really does need to be a mix of SMR's and clean alternatives for any real goal of future energy demands, but to completely rule out nuclear because of a couple accidents (some from bad design and/or placement) is shooting ourselves in the foot.
no, every reactor can be weaponized by malicious actors and start a nuclear war, for a start.
Its also prohibitively expensive, everywhere.
@@Unknown_Genius Yeah, it seems like so many of the 'solutions' they keep touting are just moving the carbon to an out of sight, out of mind kind of place. I was reading an article a while back about the solution for nuclear waste and that it had mostly been solved, can't remember where but I think someone also made a video about it, might have been Kyle Hill or someone like that.
Actually the main arguments against nuclear (from the non-dogmatic middle ground) are the strongest and most convicing - nuclear is far too expensive. It is also not as reliable as we are told - the "down times" are suprisingly high. It is also not as flexible as other forms of large scale generation - which is increasingly important in an industry dominated by renewables.
Talking of mines. Have you asked yourself where the uranium comes from and how these mines are run?
Then France stops being self-relient.
@@1968Christiaan Indeed, and the problem is that such a divisive topic is never discussed in good faith. There are good anti-nuclear positions about costs, downtimes, huge upfront cost, access to water when europe is going through droughts, etc...
(I say that as someone heavily in favor of nuclear and, while hating Macron's guts, thinks his energy policy is by far the best in Europe)
Yeah it was great having Germany criticize Russia while simultaneously buying oil from them in insane quantities.
Well, now he’s buying. They just transport it through India, burning a lot of fuel. There used to be efficient gas pipelines.
But there are two advantages:
1. Germany no longer depends on gas from Russia. Depends on fertilizers from Russia.
2. Russia will not freeze due to global warming.
Man they are super hypocrites,
😭🤮😓😵
@@jamesburrows3602 you cannot trust germans in business and in general !
@@jamesburrows3602 German governments since Merkel got to power in 2005 are a complete joke
It is incredible how much harm Germany caused to the World since its foundation. Amazes me.
My grandparents life hardly 2kms away from the Obrigheim powerplant and the rural area I live in in the north was supposed to house a disposal site of the reactors so this topic was always part of my life, thank you for this informative video
To add two points:
a) the nuclear power plants was always state of the art of this generation, they were continously updated.
b) the generation was among other choosen by FJ Strauss, 'cause he speculated at atomic weapons. So the NucPowPlants wasn't as efficent as they could be.
I am from Chinese nuclear industry. From my point of view, I do not agree with point a. There are many numbers of new nuclear power plant built in China, but their technology levle kind of fall behind other industry. Due to the high cost of proving the usefulness of new technology intended to be used in nuclear power plant, the whole nuclear industry do not advance at the same level as other industry but fall behind massively. Most nuclear power plants in French and America might has the same issue as China, since they are built mosttly during 1980s. The new nuclear power plant of EPR from EDF is kind of failure and do not advance as much as it should. AP1000 is new though, but I do not understand as much as EPR.
In Finland we need 1 extra nuclear power plant of traditional scale to make ourselves completely energy independent. This was cancelled because Rosatom wasn't to be trusted anymore as plant deliver & fuel provider. Then again we need to replace 4 reactors (80%) like France, so in total we should start during this decade 5 new reactor projects. We have first EPR2 reactor running, so when we have run it a few years I think we should copy-paste reactor replacements from it. After that Finland should use localized smaller modular reactors on city level to provide heat and baseline energy for cities to replace gas/coal for heating during coldest winter days.
Finland stopped using Rosatom for political reasons against russia, not because Rosatom isnt trusted. The finnish are extremely anti russian and your gov did it due to the war in ukraine and so you dont have to be dependant upon russian energy - as that is what the EU has advised its members to do
This really needs more upvotes. I think almost no one in the discussion ACTUALLY knows where the radio active materials come from and how much of a claw Russia has on that market. It's WAY worse than the one on oil / gas.
People are stupidly funny sometimes. I think if they just see an egg in a pan they believe it might have come from the supermarket, not a chicken.
With that many nukes Finland will probably ve able to heat with electricity like Sweden
Finland already have 2 Russian reactors and they have bought fuel for them from Sweden for decades now. Westinghouse in Västerås-Sweden is one of the largest surplyer of fuel for VVER reactor, and the largest outside of Russia. So there is really not a problem not buying fuel from Russia. So the current 2 VVER reactors in Finland have no problem getting fuel
@@tehabe
" marvel but an economic nightmare."
You are wrong about that. OL3 is making a massive profit despite being quite a bit over budget. That is unlike windpower that makes huge losses despite being on budget.
I live near 3 mile Island and was watching the TV news every day during that time, since that time I have spoken with some of the former workers. Human error such as post it type notes covering part of a screen used to monitor the station were a major contributing factor but almost no one mentions that.
What are you talking about, everyone mentions human error, lol. It's part of why a major driving factor in reactor designs of the last 50 years have explicitly had the goal of reducing the requirement for human interaction especially regarding critical functions and emergencies. Newer designs can't melt down in the same way because they aren't relying on human input to prevent a meltdown.
@@KingBobXVISo many people in the general populace ignore what actually caused the incident at 3 Mile Island. I never even got a decent chunk of the story until five years ago when I finally thought I’d just google it myself.
So when people are talking about the actual situation, yes, they mention human error because that’s a normal thing to report on. When people are scaremongering about nuclear power plants or just mentioning the accident in passing, they don’t. They super don’t. For the former category, it implies that there is a safe way to operate a plant without human error to say that. It’s just such a hot mess.
Deaths due to 3 mile Island? ZERO.
Possibly had his own agenda. Three Mile Island scared the s... out of people who read the detailed reports as it exposed the appalling engineering that occurred in nuclear plants and the very dodgy to almost non-existent risk analysis that was carried out, Fukushima continued on with that tradition. TMI had such wonderful engineering las a critical valve that was activated during reactor shut down but did not close when it should have, critically the control panel showed that the valve had activated properly as it showed that an electrical signal had been sent to the valve, it did not show the actual position of the valve, to determine this, the operators would have to go down to the reactor building and physically observe the valve. So a root cause of the destruction of the reactor was dumb engineering or cost cutting on a couple of sets of contacts and some wiring, a simplification but you get the gist.
Everyone should know about the stupidity of the designers and builders of Fukushima in the placement of the emergency generators and switching gear, as well as the complacency of the operators in not quickly correcting the issue once they became aware of it. I can't even contemplate how anyone could misinterpret or not understand the Tsunami risks of the plant - one in a 100 year event does not meant that the next event is 100 years away, it could be tomorrow, there could be three in a row mere weeks apart, why would anyone settle for such a high risk when... ohh, never mind.
@@scottslotterbeck3796wow only zero deaths? This must mean that nuclear power is completely safe compared to toasters which kill hundreds every year! Let's built ten thousand nuclear reactors in every country on the planet! The nuclear waste we will just pile up in some poor African country or give to the fish in the ocean to deal with. Wow only zero deaths that's awesome!
14:09 This graph is absolute BS. Like always, the storage problem is being ignored. If you calculate the price of wind power or photovoltaic, then battery storage needs to be included.
Backup has to be calculated for every power plant.
This summer a nuclear power went offline because of an electrical fire in Texas.
Thx to large batteries, this over 1 GW of power drop had no effect on the grid.
@old-pete
That wasn't the topic. Gaslighting.
@@NoidoDevYou were writing about backup, unless you were gaslighting.
There are a few german political specifics missing.
The first phase out was planned similar to what you named as the "middle way". A slow reduction of nuclear power, while ramping up renewable power.
The problem was than reversing this plan and later making a new phase out which had no real plan behind it (the one Merkel is responsible for).
Instead the renewable industry was systematically destroyed (Germany was leading in the tech for solar and wind energy before Merkel) and a switch to natural gas was favoured (with massiv lobbying).
When they than relized that was a shit idea, both from the view of climate change and the dependency to dictatorships like russia, it was to late for both ways.
Going back to a slow nuclear phase out was not possible anymore and the the renewable energy was also not build up good and fast enough.
The sad thing is that you probably believe this whitewash.
The German solar industry is dead because it is not competitive.
And the foreign industry only sells in Germany because the plants are massively subsidized.
And the disaster would have happened in exactly the same way, perhaps with a few years' delay, if the original plan had been adhered to.
This is because renewable energies are simply not capable of replacing conventional power plants.
Dictatorship like Russia? I see...
So, it this wonderful plan of yours, mind telling me where, exactly, you planned to get the fuel for those Nuclear reactors? Where is your uranium getting mined? What are you doing with the spent fuel? Do you have the technology and expertise to create the entire industrial chain?
Without Russia.
Oh, wait. You don't have to answer that, because you already gave an answer with your actions. It's not a very creative solution, I have to say...
Here we go...again, and again, and again....Drang nach Osten!
We all know who will triumph in this newest attempt to "Manifest Destiny" your way into taking over Russia. I'm just surprised that German greed overpowered rationality and suicide was chosen over peaceful coexistence. Since you consistently take our kindness for a weakness, we will have to explain it in your own language. Generalplan Ost, except we don't want German land. We just want to be left alone. If Germany is an irradiated wasteland, we don't have to worry about attacks from the West...
Common myths of the anti-nuclear movement.
But this is simply nonsense.
There is simply no way(!) to replace nuclear power plants with renewables.
The plan was completely hopeless from the start.
@@11everhard Exactly. Nuclear can't be replaced. Not now, not 25 years from now.
@@11everhard What we are seeing now is people owning a house taking their electricity supply into their own hands. There are some mistakes being made in terms of the extra going to the grid not being paid for so people try to waste it or turn off the supply instead, but it will have an impact on the long run. There are more ways than we thought and there is constant research on storage and optimization. The best scenario would be to be freed of both fossils and nuclear, but it will never happen if we don't go out of our way and try (unless there is another accident before then that would somehow be worse than the others).
Thank you for taking the time to explain the use of Iodine tablets. Often it gets treated as a cure all for radiation, so it was good to hear it explained right.
It was hysterical over-reaction. even as some radiation was blown over Europe, it was so low, that did minimal damage ... I live near former Uranium mine and many miners lived in our city
so, my RadAway is useless? damn.
It's not a cure but a preventative step to avoid Radioactive iodine build up through contaminated food/water.
@@skepticalmagos_101 Exactly. That is what it is used for. Hollywood is especially fond of using Iodine pills for scenes that involve radiation that would never have radioactive Iodine present. Most TH-cam videos that discuss incidents that require the distribution of Iodine pills get the specifics of the distribution correct but generally do not address why. I like that the reason for the distribution was discussed to help work against what seems to me has become largely a Hollywood stereotype.
My grandfather worked in Germany's first nuclear power plant; the Versuchsatomkraftwerk Kahl (the 'test nuclear power plant Kahl'. Built in 1961.). Though it wasn't actually build in Kahl, but right outside of it. In the neighbouring town of Karlstein, where I grew up. To this day, the town's coat of arms displays an atom to commemorate that.
Bonus fun fact about that town: Karlstein is named after 'Karl dem Großen', better known as Charlemagne. The "father of europe" would often travel through the town to get to his favored hunting grounds in the nearby Spessart woods. And ~1200 years later, the nuclear power plant was built right by the river he had to cross to get there.
Crazy to think about that.
There is even Netflix series about this plant - Dark (2017). In fact, the plant caused some timeloops and end of the world. I still think it was right decision to shut it down
@@alexbork4250 hahahah americans...
I don't know why Nuclear isn't considered "renewable", isn't France recycling some of its spent nuclear fuel? I heard from another video that MOX fuel (recycled uranium + plutonium) accounts for 10% of France's total energy output.
That is not renewable.
@@old-pete :(
@@old-peteEn el concepto de renovables si es renovables, y en cuestión realizar es aún mas renovables que las la energía "limpia"
@@elredentor6545No, it is not, as it is used up.
cutting out nuclear while trying to go green (especially for a major economy) is like cutting out one of your legs right before the marathon.
And another one who has no clue what they are talking about.
@@moos5221 please enlighten us all with your counter argument
@@comrade107 Nuclear is a very costly (have to factor in nuclear waste storage and nuclear power plant decommissioning, both costs that the tax payers will have to take care of). Germany has successfully shut down ALL nuclear power plants and is still producing enough energy to supply neighboring countries who can't fulfill their own needs, for example France. Not shutting down nuclear energy just slows the conversion to full renewable energy power production, so it was the right thing to do.
If you aren't convinced, then please enlighten us now with your arguments why you think it was a desaster to cut nuclear energy from the mix.
@@user-bw6jg4ej2m that's russian propaganda or what? nobody needed to cut their heating at all and coal only needed to be burned to support the neighboring countries that couldn't support their own. also Germany has probably the best coal power plants in the world, but ofc it's still better to have 100% renewable energy which is the ultimate goal. just happy we don't use nuclear power anymore, since it's obvious that that's a very bad choice.
@@moos5221 upfront cost, storage of spent fuel and safety are quite valid points. However, all major economies US, UK, China,India and even Japan(despite Fukushima) have concluded that nuclear is going to be a key stable source of energy (at least in medium term) and hence are doubling down on it. Solar/wind is great but not stable enough to support the energy needs of a big country alone. They have to be complemented with something that is more stable, low carbon and relatively on demand, until the battery tech matures further. I understand your sentiment of going 100 %renewable (something I desire too) but we have to be realistic.
Also, the first three points of concern are either already addressed or being addressed through new solutions like deep underground storage vaults like in Finland, Smaller modular reactors, reactors for spent fuel etc. Hope that answers ur question:)
Just for the record:
Today, France is producing 25g of CO2 for every kWh it produces. Compare that to Germany’s 200g in summer.
You can track that in real-time on electricity maps.
I googled it, its about 40g for france and 100g for germany. You tweak the numbers a lot to support your opinions i see 🤡.
@@SeaShrimp Look at the date. That was 11 days ago. Attention to details does not appear to be one of your core strength.
@@SeaShrimpbet you feel stupid now
People seem to forget / or are not aware that the original CDU/CSU plan wasn't coal. They banked on expanding connections towards the Kremel made in the early 2000s - it's why they would consequently go on to essentially put the better renewable option on hold. So it's not really down to not going nuclear but not going nuclear AND putting the actual already planned alternatives on hold.
Yes, but for one, only one nuclear accident of his old reactors, could change everything, at that numbers CO2 is not dangerous for life, instead a Fukushima level in France would be a complete disaster not only for France, so it's not the same apples to apples comparison.
Intresting video !
I actually worked at the EPR contruction in Flamanville.
It's important to note that this reactor is a prototype one and we expect to use all the knowledge learned to make the EPR2 more cost effective while of course being as safe as possible. But being a prototype means often running over budget and time, and that applies not only for nuclear reactors... Look at how much money SpaceX put into the Falcon 9 before it properly worked...
Also a sister reactor (also a gen 1 EPR prototype) recently started in Finland at Olkiluoto.
I sincerly hope we can put the nuclear industry back on rail in France. Coupled with renewable energy, it makes for a stronger energy grid by being more diverse and less prone to single point failing or common factor failing...
But ask Areva how much they lost with the finnish reactor.....
I like the EPR design, but if they can't be built in less than 5 years for less than 5E9€, they are not a viable options.
You forgotten the EPR Reactor in china, the name of the plant is Taishan 1, it was shutdown because the cooling system caused the Fuel elements to get damaged.
The plant is in operation again but well its china, ob they solved the issue fully no idea.
@@wernerviehhauser94 indeed. We hope yhe EPR2 can make things much better in this regard
@@asokawhite i believe it was shut down recently again. China doesn't have a record of being transparent regarding safety and issues...
Having EDF involved in the operation of Taishan helped a bit as they pushed towards shutting down the plant to inspect the fuel rods
@@MysterDaftGame True, interesting enough they got build 5 years behind shedule and other bugdet to by more as the double.
The irony of Germany despising nuclear power when German physicists and engineers first pioneered the field to begin with is quite something .
Our government is tripping, like it was one of the top ten nuclear plants which were built and they just don't make use of it, no they destroyed it instead🥲
Like i would get it, if we had tsunamis, tornados, earthquakes or other natural disasters in germany, but they are non existent here.
Either our politicians are either dumb crazy maniacs or get controlled by other nations, who want Germany to stay down.
Maybe even a prank, else I don't get how someone could make so many decisions which cripple a country more than it will help😅
German scientists couldn't figure out how to engineer a sustained nuclear reaction which is why many of us are not speaking German today (or Japanese). Verner Heisenberg miscalculated the amount of highly enriched uranium by a factor of 50, he thought it was plausible that we'd need 2000lb of heu to have a critical mass.
11:39 This problem wasn't a result of decades of underinvestment but caused by entirely new technical issues, discovered thanks to new scanning technologies. French reactors have the world's strictest standards. This is incidentally why they were shut down: the importance of cracks is overstated as they were on redundant emergency systems.
yeah, who would ever need emergency systems. it's completely fine if they don't work, no problems at all.
@@moos5221 Yes and that is why France took the decision to shut down its nuclear reactors in the middle of winter with Russian gas cut off. It was the right decision.
@@julientabulazero103 Germany was there to export energy to France in 2022, no problem. The french reliance on russian uranium is a serious problem though, France paying for the Russian war effort, sad story.
@@moos5221 France main supplier of uranium are Canada, Khazakstan and Australia. You are however right to point out that many reactors in Eastern Europe rely on Russia because they wereuilt during the soviet union time to use russian rods.
@@julientabulazero103 France still imports plutonium from Russia, making it one of the only countries in the EU to still pay Russia blood money for fuel.
Also important to note that other countries have banned nuclear right after Chernobyl. Like Italy. It's not actually just a German thing
Yeah, several countries and peoples in Europe are very anti Nuclear. Heck all the "Nuclear power no thanks" stickers used in the protests all over the world were designed by a small group of protesters in Denmark, one of the first nations to oppose nuclear power over concerns of safety and disposal of radioactive waste. Denmark doesnt have any full scale nuclear powerplants either, only a few small test reactors at a research facility from the 50's and 60's, and even there, the nuclear waste barrels from them have been mothballed around for decades with no permanent long term storage found anywhere in the whole country.
These nuclear accidents are NOT the reason why we Germans have shut down our nuclear power plants. The reason is that there is no way to get rid of the nuclear waste or safely store it. Surely those accidents might have pushed the demonstrations against nuclear power but they (safety concerns) were NOT the main reason.
I don't know how other countries are dealing with it but in Germany there is no suitable place to store the radioactive waste at the moment. We have been searching for over half a century and we are still searching for it.
@@Dr_ShadowTimeSeems way better than coal to me
@@charakiga @charakiga I never argued about that. I don't think it's good that Germany is dependent on other countries energy exports. Nuclear energy is definitely better than coal. Germany is a very small country and while countries like the US have large uninhabited areas Germany is extremly densely populated. Obviously nobody wants to have this shit in his backyard and there is simply no place in Germany where you could store all the nuclear waste safely for millions of years. For over half a century Germany has been searching for a suitable place but until this day we have not found it, chances are that we'll never find one and we can't just look away from this problem, ignore it and have some other generations fix the problems we have made them in the past. And then there is another problem: How can we warn other people in millions of years that there is extremly dangerous radioactive material down there? What if future inhabitants don't understand our warnings? We also haven't found any alternatives yet to get rid of the nuclear waste.
My opinion: Nuclear energy is indeed a good way to counteract the climate change, but until we have not found a solution to solve these problems, this is simply not an option.
I find it interesting that Germany is so pessimistic about nuclear plants, if you were to make a list of countries most able to run them safely you'd probably put Germany at the top, they're kind of associated with industrial excellence.
It's a topic for a different video but... are any of these countries anywhere near ready for the ban on petrol cars? Maybe they're expecting fusion power in 10 years...
No, they are most definitely not ready.
No matter how much they exclaim it to the heavens.
Unless they want to make Electric Cars absolutely free for everyone and production can keep up with a massive surge in demand.
It also puts a lot of stress on the energy grid.
buillding a car or a handtool is not the same as building a network with nuclear power plants. French excells building at large scale (TGV, Total, nuclear, ...).
If they're expecting fusion power they will be waiting a very long time and pouring obscene amounts of money down the drain trying to get there that could have been far better spent elsewhere.
Germans are pessimistic about everything, they are thought to hate themselves
German here: A big issue Germans have is with the longterm storage of spent fuel rods and nuclear waste. Germany is densely populated. This makes finding a possible location for longterm storage for the next couple of thousand years basically impossible. Personally, I never really had any doubts in the safety of German reactors. Chernobyl has taught us a lot, and we aren't at risk of getting any tsunamis or big earth quakes like Fukushima. In the long run, I prefer not having any fission reactors in Germany because of the issue with nuclear waste. However, I do think the exit of fission energy was poorly, if not disastrously, planned and executed. We should have massively invested in other low-carbon energy sources. Shutting down our reactors and supplementing the energy production with coal power plants is fundamentally the wrong move. After Fukushima, the Merkel government basically decided to shut down the last reactor within 12 years, and even compensated the energy providers with 2,4billion€ for making them shut down their reactors earlier than originally planned. Instead of 2023, the shut down date should have been in 2040s or so. This decision was purely reactionary. At the same time, we became increasingly dependent on cheap Russian gas. However, the issue we now have is rather tricky. As far as I know, the recently shutdown fission reactors are not in a condition that would allow restarting and using them again. So either they would have to undergo an extensive refit, or Germany would have to build new nuclear power plants from scratch. Both options would take years and new power plants would be incredibly expensive. Never mind, that it will basically be near impossible to find a new location because of all the NIMBYs. (Germany built and finished a fully functional nuclear power plant that never started producing energy, because the people living next to the power plant stopped it - I think it was an issue of improper planning permission etc.) So there is no quick, temporary solution to supplement coal power plants.
TLDR: Longterm nuclear waste storage is a huge issue in Germany. I think in the long run, an exit out of fission energy is good, but Germany wasn't ready and prepared for it. The exit date was too early. Now, there is no easy and quick solution to bridge the time until more low-carbon producing energy infrastructure is built.
(ps.: I just want to add that German households don't use electricity for heating. Heating is done by oil or gas burners (my sister's newly built house even uses geothermal energy). I see a lot of non-germans think that we will sit in cold homes during the winter now, because we shut down our nuclear power plants. This was never an issue. And had we not stopped importing cheap Russian gas, at the same time as shutting down the last nuclear reactors, it probably would have never made the headlines in the international media.)
The typical example that the best intentions may lead to worse outcomes
Very Interesting video, love it.
Taiwan is also having a major power issue.
Originally our power grid consist of 20% nuclear power, 47% from coal, and green energy only took 3%.
But just like the Germans, the Taiwanese started to be afraid of nuclear power, especially after Fukushima nuclear disaster.
So the no.4 nuclear reactor construction was canceled, and our government construct more coal & natural gas generators.
Besides the negative impact on the environment, one of the big problems is that we don't produce coal, natural gas, or oil.
Based on the thread next door, the supplies of coal, natural gas, and oil can be cut off pretty easily. This makes Taiwan very vulnerable.
For the green energy, we don't have many choices. Our wind is seasonal, and destructive typhoons are common during summer.
Geothermal power is also not a choice since our hot springs are acidic. Other green energy options also have their own problems and due to space, I am not going to mention all of them.
Personally, I support nuclear power. Not because it is perfect, it's definitely not, but it is necessary.
I think it is the stepping stone for us to find the next solution before we destroyed the environment.
Korean here, sounds like both our countries have similar problems
So you're saying the problem with using coal, natural gas, and oil is that you have to import them. But, does Taiwan mine its own uranium? If not, how is nuclear different? Of course, things like solar panels and batteries tend to require imported components . . . but that's a longer term issue; once you have a bunch installed, sudden supply shocks aren't really a thing.
@@purplelibraryguy8729 so they can't buy in and stockpile uranium like you're suggesting with solar then 🤦♂️
Taiwan one of the few countries stupid enough to fully build a nuclear power plant and never put it in operation (see Lungmen NPP).
This "honor" it only shares with Austria, Spain and the Philippines. Perhaps Italy if you want to count it right before they also banned nuclear energy there.
@@purplelibraryguy8729 A uranium fuel load in a big reactor is 60-80 tons and lasts 4-5 years. So with a single shipment you can potentially buy all the fuel requirements for several decades - if you want to. There's plenty of uranium suppliers, and even if the entire world is against you, as a country with access to the ocean you can also extract it from seawater if you need to (it's about 4-5x more expensive than uranium from mining).
The last nuclear power plant which was shut down was in the city of Landshut. I saw it many times and a lot of people gathe in front of its last day to commemorate its work. I didn't realise at all that a city that small had a nuclear power plant. Interesting.
probably because land is cheaper in smaller cities which makes a huge difference when building a site as huge as a nuclear power plant.
I like how this video keeps getting recommended every now and then and the comment section gets more heated everytime
10:10 Magnox?
Britain kept ones running until the mid 2010s, and North Korea uses them to this day.
SO LOOKING FORWARD to your micro nuclear episode!! This one was so insightful and I was sitting here wondering when you would get to micro nuclear. Sad to see it was a "See you next time" mention. Still, glad you're doing it. You're one of the few channels I have set to notify. Thank you for your objective and deep insight into this subject. Oh and I use Ruby and Java with dabbling in Python and Shell. Just never got deep into Python even with its ubiquity. Thank you again!
Nobody cares about your code monkey job.
I hope he covers waste reactors. I LOVE the concept of waste reactors. The main remaining problem with nuclear isn't really safety anymore, it's waste. (Obligatory reminder here that we have an urgent greenhouse emissions issue, NOT an urgent nuclear waste issue.) There are some companies who can build reactors that generate a lot more power from nuclear waste material, and their own waste products have FAR lower half-lives.
@@webx135 and thorium! Less radioactivity. I saw a waste reactor story some time ago saying we were wasting like 90% of uranium's half-life or something like that? Insane!
@@webx135 Do we have a waste issue if all the nuclear waste generated in the US since its inception, can fit into the area the size of a football field?
@@SirOpinesALot No. Hence my reminder that we have an urgent greenhouse emissions issue, not an urgent nuclear waste issue.
But also, keep in mind the half-life of this waste. Without post-processing, nuclear waste is effectively permanent, and no storage solution is permanent.
That's why I'm interested in waste reactors.
People in Germany were mostly protesting because of the long term storage of nuclear waste was mishandled and not because of the fear of nuclear meltdown.
One of the old salt mines designated for long term storage had water flow in in the first couple years, showing that it wasn't safe to contain the nuclear waste.
Yeah this will be a massiv issue with the NIMBYs when the search for the final storage is moving forward. Building up the trust again will take a long time.
well but it was recenly discoverd by me and doing resarch aobut acrute infomation about high grad nuclear waste and how nuclear stuff works. so i fonud out that in realty that most high level nuclear waste most radioactive prodacts can be in fact used for RTGs or nuclear sterling engine fuel for 30 years then would become mostly inert after 30 years for the most part. also the rest of the stuff in the high grade nuclear waste has soo many usefuel rare earth element isopotes that can be also used after wards. this is expacly the pure leftover zecuom 90 isotpoes that is needed for steam, aerospace jet and rocket terbines metal alloys. also that tacly high level nuclear waste could also just be safly stord in long term nuclear sterlling or rtg power plant and waste conament power genrator felcasitys for 30+ years and generate power on the side. this is bescue a very sinfict aomut of a allready known radioactive mertal that is the most of the hazerd is bascly alot of it is stroum isotpyes that fully decays after 30 years turns into bascly the same zecuom 90 that huge amonuts of it could be used for massvle aerosapce indutrey. in fact thats why alot of post cold war ussr rtg genrators where radied for that super rare zicouim 90 metal that been left in the fully decayed stroum isotpye powered russen rtgs back in the 1970s.
@@toggleton6365 Well, calling people that don't want toxic waste leaks under there feet NIMBY's is quite the statement.
@@silphonym But that is literally what NIMBY means. We need a storage but Not In My BackYard. I am in a Region that is looked at in the Nuclear storage search right now.
I mean we have with most of the Windpower parks that get planned and you instantly get a lot new bird lovers that search for rare birds to stop the projects.
It was not even meant negative. just the political reality that every search for a storage will mean a lot of pressure from the local population.
Long term storage of nuclear "waste" is a myth and not needed at all. Nuclear waste can already easily be re-used and literally recycled. With the advance of technology we will even be able to completely neutralize all radiation.
I just want to add some context/extra infos to Germanys abandonment of nuclear energy:
- A huge unsolved political problem was the long term storage of nuclear waste. Especially, when the "Asse"-Project (storage within a salt mine in nothern germany) turned out to be unsafe (leaking water, danger of ground water contamination); Still, there is no true solution, how to make that nuclear waste depot safe. Ironically, the environment minister responsible for that project was Angela Merkel
- The decision of Angela Merkel's government to shut down the reacors was highly controversial at the time. Just a few months earlier, a law was passed by the CDU that the nuclear could run at least 10 further years. However, after the Fokushima disaster, Angela Merkel announced in a public proclemation (without pressure of the green party! ) that all nuclear reactors should be turned of as soon as possible. Energy companys sued the german government and got a lot of financial compensation to shut down reactors early.
- As mentioned in the video, nuclear energy isn't exactly cheap, because of the extremly high safety standards compared to regular powerplants. Since german chancellor in the early 2000s Gerhard Schröder was best buddy with Putin (he later go an executive job at Gazprom) and there was big supply of cheap russian gas I can imagine, that it seemed like a reasonable strategy at the time, to swith from the troublesome nuclear power (with all the demonstrations and unsolved waste storage problems) to gas imports.
- The german goverment was conviced in the 2010s, that russia would not threaten their economic ties since it also benefitted from German technology. The russian-german relationship soured within the last decade (compared to Schröder times), but even after the Krimea annexation the construction of Nord Stream 2(which started ~2011) was not stopped until the war in Ukraine 2022. So it was most likely an economical decision, based on wrong assumption of the future (we turned our heating down to 15° to keep regular heating prizes in winter 2022).
- The german dependancy to russian energy imports (even the german gas storage were sold to Gazprom and were "suprisingly" very low during the 2022 energy crisis, but have been refilled since then) might be one of several reasons, why the german government was very hesitant to support Ukraine actively in 2022
@@Apodeipnon It's a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Germany is a big supporter of Ukraine. That's why we decided to break our economic ties with Russia.
I was really surprised that this video didn't touch on the storage at all. That's hands-down the second biggest lasting concern for people here, after a Chernobyl/Fukushima/Die Wolke kind of scenario.
Long term storage isn't very difficult, except politically. You could literally just build warehouses and pile it up in there. Not an optimal solution obviously, but it would work.
@@Apodeipnon First I'd like to clarify what I meant with "russia threatened economic ties":
Germany thought it could influence Russian political decision making due to their trade connections. It was believed in Germany, that if Russia would go against german political interests, these economic ties would be sufficient to convince them to change their mind. The annexion of crimea peninsula was a shock for the german government, which had to prepare a whole new long-term strategy (I do not know if they prepared/finished a new one ;-) ). What really damaged the german trust in Russian-German economic ties was the reduction of gas throughput through the gas-pipelines during the energy crisis in 2022. Russian proclaimed technical problems, however the russian claims seemed not very convincing from a german perspective.
Regarding Nord Stream: From my point of view I still haven't heard any convincing story, either pro or against Russia, how it was done with proofs, which might be checked with open source data. It could have been strategy to increase political pressure on germany during an energy crisis and to start a blame game to weaken the commen resolve within Nato. It could also be a plan to damage russian econmy by denying gas export ... we simply do not know and cannot prove anything for that topic.
Last but not least:
I disagree that we see is proxy war between US and Russia. It might be true, that Russia wants to dethrone US as global political super-power, but calling it a russian-US war is in my opinion an oversimplification.
For example it is against German interest, that Russia has started an military invasion of Ukraine including annexations(with a prepared military build up beforehand).
Russia claims it has its reasons (I wont debate if they are good or bad), but in effect that means for Germany, that it cannot blindly rely anymore, that russia will keep the peace in the border regions (where are EU & Nato countries). Germany cannot blindly rely means, that Germany (and especially the eastern EU countries) feels the need for a functional military. This is extremly expensive for Germany (see Scholz 100Billion Euro announcment for the Bundeswehr), because in the last 20years the german Bundeswehr had a severe lack of funding and is currently in a bad state. Beforehand Germany could get by with an underfunded military, because it felt like it was surrounded by friends. Now it has to become capable again, to perform in a potential worst case scenario which is extremly expensive. For those reasons I believe Germany has a big motivation (still not discussing if the motivation is good or bad) to support Ukraine in order to discourage Russia from trying to achive political goals with military means.
@@nekkowe cause it's a non issue that's always blown up to keep the coal money rolling.
Die kWh von meiner 29 Jahre alten PV-Anlage kostet mich an meiner Steckdose ca. 1 Cent/kWh und das ohne Stromspeicher.
+
Beim E-Auto + PV-Stromüberschuss sind das ca. 0,20 €/100km an Energiekosten.
(20kWh/100km)
+
1 kWh Solarstrom bei der Wärmepumpe bringt ca. 3 kWh Wärme, Energiekosten ca. 0,004 €/kWh (Wärme)
+
Die installierte Leistung der Erneuerbaren hat in Deutschland im Jahr 2023 um über +17GW zulegen.
Und doch erwarten Sie, zu jeder einzelnen Sekunde(!) im Jahr, gegebenfalls mit Kohle- oder Stomstrom, versorgt zu werden.
@@11everhard
Wir kaufen bei uns im Haus nur "grünen" Strom in jeder Sekunde, wenn wir Netzstrom kaufen, Kohlestrom ist uns zu teuer.
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@@wernermuller3522Sie wissen, das das Unsinn ist.
@@11everhard
Und wie kommen Sie zu dieser Aussage, nur schreiben "Unsinn" ist auch kein Argument.
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@@11everhard
Alle, mit oder ohne PV-Anlage haben zu jeder einzelnen Sekunde Netzstrom.
.-.
I don't think the age thing is as dire as it's made out to be in this video. Maybe beef up some maintenance and checkup practices, but a lot of western reactor designs (and hell, even RBMK reactors with modern mods) have far outlasted their initial design parameters pretty successfully. They should NOT be shut down until at least the equivalent amount of power is being output from new reactors.
There is such a thing as metal fatigue. Haven't you heard?
That is why they give an expiration date for cars, planes, ships. And after a certain period of service, they are forced to write off precisely because of this fact.
@@TheGreatCatsby-pd2tt the plants have expiration dates too, they're just into the future after reevaluation.
And no, cars and planes don't have fixed expiration dates either. The latter are regularly inspected and service dates adjusted accordingly. It's actually a great analogy.
@@ChristopherBurtraw 🤦♂️🤦🤦♀️
The smart minority agrees with you
Well the reactore containment is whats most critical here. Fatique due to thermal and radiative loads limits the life span, usually this would be far more in the future than the 40 years though. On the other hand, we saw hairline cracks in the pressure containmant way earlier than expected (belgium and england if im not mistaken).
And furthermore, maintenance cost is what can make a plant unprofitable.... paired with the costs for decommissioning a NPP, its not a cheap hobby.
A lot of it is a political problem. It's one thing to ban building new versions of a certain thing, but too often the decisions about what to use as a replacement are so far off that it becomes someone elses problem. I think one of the biggest challenges that the world is facing now is that so many things that were once "someone else's problem" are now our problem. It's even worse when it comes to things that last a generation or more. Even worse, too often the solutions are short term, stopgap measures, because the solution is always around the corner. Energy i think is one of those things that needs a technocratic approach. Politicians think too short term to handle it. The free market is also too focussed on the here and now profits.
Underrated comment
But "it will be someone else's problem" is exactly the problem with long-term storage of nuclear waste. You can see it in the comments here, people are saying to just put it in some mine shaft for a while until some technology arrives that will let us use it. That's not being responsible, that's dropping the responsibility on the coming generations.
@@kshadehyaena dont be so blind please xd the nuclear waste you are refering to is not even more dangerous than the radiactive waste of coal power plants, which are pumping the air you breath with radioactive material even right now unfiltered....and that is 100 times more radioactive than the most of the nuclear waste from nuclear power plants. educate yourself please
"The free market is also too focussed on the here and now profits"
Yeah, just Shell´s stuborness for 10-12% profit marginns is only hurting decarbonisation.
"6 replies", TH-cam? Why show me only four? #censorship
Frances electrical exports to the UK are also imports depending on the loads in each country the connection flows both ways, the same happens with Belgium,Ireland,Netherlands and Norway
there is also now going to be a connector built direct from the UK to Germany
Yes, they all import and export, and sometimes switching during the same day, for various reasons: the Kettle effect, the proximity of the production with the consumption site (electricity don't really like to travel long distance) and total production capacity at some times (mostly for solar and wind)
But on average, France exports more than it imports with its neighbours.
It's a net exporter.
This is an excellent video and, as a French, I didn’t know that our nuclear forces were so old and obsolete. Thank you for your work!
I don't quite know why it's this way, but wind direction refers to where the winds originate. So winds travelling from east to west are called "easterly" winds.
Agree. The reason is that you can physically feel from which direction the wind comes, and what weather it brings to you, not where it will be going. And also in pre-industrial age, it was all important to know where from what direction you could get the power of the wind, or from what direction you had to take shelter from the wind.
All points made here are extremely well made and well reasoned. But I think it can be safely argued that many of the problems explored aren't inherent to nuclear itself, but rather poor management and investment surrounding it, which could happen in any kind of energy infrastructure. But fair enough, the consequences are far more dire with nuclear.
The main problem of nuclear is cost burden created by regulation. With infinite regulation energy becomes infinitely costly. That's mainly a PR problem.
@@ugjhgjfDon’t forget how nuclear energy is actually taxed, instead of subsidized like every other energy source (at least in the US). But even with restrictions like these, nuclear is still ridiculously cheap once you’ve got your reactor working
That's the key problem of nuclear. The high initial costs takes 20-30 years to recoup. If a fickle government might suddenly decide shut your power plant down in 10 years you can't built it.
One point not even mentioned though, and for me this is the most interesting: nuclear waste. As if it wasn't even a thing. I don't know any country on earth with a good solution.
@@henning_jasper "I don't know any country on earth with a good solution."
Clearly you haven't done even the most basic search. There already is an excellent solution. Storing the sealed waste underground surrounded by non-permeable rocks.
The topic for germany is extremely complex. It has a social background (elite vs. the simple men) as in France the pension discussion and in the UK the mining strikes. They defined generations. Then there were scandals after scandals, where mistakes made was tried to be hidden by pro-nuclear governments. Building on seismic faults (Mülheim Kährlich, was shortly after shut down because they try to move it against the approved building plans a few metres) or a Thorium reactor burning more fuel than expected (Hamm Uentrop, after too many smaller incidence shut down after a few years). And then there are party funded by the government studies, which put the validity of nuclear energy in doubt. One showed already in the 70s that nuclear reactors will end with large emergencies every 10.000 years. Problem with 400 reactors world wide is, that the time has to be divided by that. Counter arguments argue about the time frame and the reactor analysed for this number, but still, having the chance that you win the catastrophe lottery every 25 years is not good PR. Also shortly before Fukushima the then Merkel government wanted to know after they extended the run time how much money was theoretically needed to insure each reactor. Well Fukushima happened and when the study came out it would be at market value about 70 billion per year. Sure, the number is heavily disputed, but fact is that still the governments have to cover the costs and not the energy giants. So it is again an argument in the elite vs. little man world. With then all the spectacle each year of returning nuclear waste, which had locally more a civil war nature, it is probably good that this episode ended earlier than later. Problem for the future is that slow reacting nuclear reactors are not compatable with fluctuating renewables and that climate change with rising cooling water temperatures lead to summer shut downs in France (up to now regularly covered by extra exports in that season from Germany, as they had about the number of nuclear reactors they used available for exports during the last decade). All in all... it is extremely complex.
Fascinating! Every time I read a German perspective/argument written by one from Germany, it is always stringently analytical. Versus rest of the world where debates have become yelling contests. Something must have done right in german education.
Nuclear power plant are technology, over years it will develop if you keep investing money. We could have small nuclear power which are more safe and easier to build. Small nuclear power plant are possible, they exist for more then 60 years in submarines so this is one way to go. Germany biggest problem is that they stop developing cutting edge technology, and today they burning coal for energy. My point is that Germany could have safe NPP and be developing cutting edge technology but they are burning coal.
Thank you for that comment. Learned more in those few lines than in the 20min video
Perfect resumeé👍
The nuclear waste topic fell flat a bit in this discussion.
There are always discussion about where to store nuclear waste. The problem is, that a final disposal site, is not just inconvenient for a area. Its more like a disaster for the whole region. The search for it is going on since i can remember. And a final decision is scheduled for the end of this decade.
The only viable but morally very questionable solution is to ship atomic waste to other countries.
4:03 The energy price crisis began in 2021, and the reason was that investment in the oil and gas sector was ca 1/3 less in 2020 during the first year of the COVID depression. After the economy restarted the following year, the capacity was lacking. Also coal prices went up in the second half of 2021 increadibly high, causing issues with the electricity market both in Australia and China.
A few observations, I know the video is not long enough to address everything, but some of the data could be misleading.
The years of construction of new plants have to be taken carefully because the EPR is a new design and a one of a kind build, it inevitably will run into overcosts and time, but Finland completed its own EPR and now energy prices and emissions are lowering.
Every mega project runs into overcosts and overtime, there’s a good video somewhere explaining economy of scale and mega projects that explained perfectly all the shenanigans behind them. Also the LCOE is an obsolete statistics as it doesn’t account for the value of energy generated in a certain moment (ie solar is cheap when there’s sun, but doesn’t account for when it’s dark), there are better parameters that account for much more, LCOE is easy, but doesn’t paint the whole picture. Also renewables have low capacity factors and the cost of a 100% renewable stable grid would be much higher than that of nuclear. What we really need to look at is the energy cost of an energy mix, nuclear + renewables is the cheapest. If we were to build nuclear reactors with a clear plan in mind, and not 3 around here and there just because, they wouldn’t take as long and be as expensive.
Also when you think about it. Electricity prices are going to be the cheapest when the solar panels are producing electricity so you get less money from operating them.
Exactly, unfortunately the european nuclear sector has lost a lot of experience and scale, but once we get back to building more fission plants, they will get cheaper and get built quicker.
I'm just so frustrated we didn't decide to go with Thorium based reactors instead of Uranium all those decades ago. No meltdowns, and plentiful in the amount we have.
Our planet would be in a much better place now probably saving over a 100 million people from perishing due to pollution related causes.
@@randomaccount53793 meh, Thorium has it's place but it's much harder to work with. The German Thorium plant was pretty much a desaster. The German Uranium plants on the other hand were some of the most impressive on earth and they had a pathway to vastly increasing the fuel efficiency, decreasig the need for imports as well as the amiunt of waste. We should have just kept builsing those.
@@Tupsuu kinda, there’s a lot to talk about costs and prices, to begin with they’re mostly unrelated and the ladder depends almost only on the energy market (it’s extremely complicated how prices are decided). There’s also the fact that renewables get a lot of incentives, in Germany for example when there’s an overabundance of renewable power they pay industries to power on their machines (straight up blank running) so they can get state incentives from selling renewable energy (it costs less to pay the industry than to waste that energy) and they even pay other countries to shut down their wind turbines so they can export. It’s a clown show.
I truly believe Nuclear Power is the best source of power at this point of time and will be until solar, hydro and wind power gets much more efficient. Based France for using it.
There's a theoretic max efficiency to wind, solar, and hydro that is determined by raw physics and thermodynamics. They're not too far out from diminishing returns now, so it's just going to be nukes
@@kayakMike1000 True I get what you mean and you're most likely right, so strange how people don't just look at the science and pure maths to see that nuclear power is way better for efficiency and effects on the environment. I would even consider that despite nuclear power being bad for local environment, nuclear power is way better for the global environment but that's more complicated to explain and I'm typing on phone right now.
nuclear power opposition comes from pure ignorance. So-called Green party fuels and uses this ignorance for political gain.
The problem is that every summer France has to shutdown almost half of their reactors because they don't have enough cooling water so what do they do then? Import energy from Germany...
@@lollol-en9xx Interesting I didn't know that, I'm sure they must have some reserves of energy though because of how much energy nuclear power creates
About college professors wanting to help. I’d say in my experience 50% are only teaching as a requirement to maintain their position and funding of research projects that they are much more interested in. At least this was my first hand experience at my public university given how often professors failed to attend their office hours and how repeated complaints to the dean were fruitless.
To clarify, this was for undergraduate school.
This is definitely true in Finland. Maybe 30% of the professors are actually interested in teaching. Some are so bad you're literally better off watching lectures on TH-cam than wasting time going to their lectures.
I am French and I witnessed the downfall of Germany's excellent nuclear and safe electricity production. As France is in Europe, we have to trade electricity to other countries. I find it incredible that the French have to provide for the others' mistakes and suffer ourselves... Note that the German coal is incredibly inefficient and polluting due to its peculiar natural composition... Yes, constructing and maintaining a nuclear power plant is very expensive per KWH compared to wind or solar powered plants. But, it can produce electricity when there is no light and where there is no wind (and it lasts several decades)! I do agree that, even if the French nuclear power plants' are ones of the safest in the world, we do have to have a more "green" approach. But, until then, this is the greenest, sustainable and capable energy production we have to date. Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that there are plans to build shore generators which will use tidal energy to make electricity in France. The electricity market in Europe really needs a video on its own, especially the laws which literally forces EDF (Électricité De France) to sell 150 TWH at a loss to "comply with the European competition law" (some crap like that)... Another video would also be good concerning Germany's law makers to torp French's production of clean and durable nuclear electricity, "because they don't like it" (these are my words). I am not like a pro nuclear electricity guy, just a man who had an 800% increase on his bill and wonders why, since we are 70% autonomous in energy production thanks to nuclear reactors... Love me or hate me, these are my thoughts. Your can find extended information on the European laws and facts. Make your research. Many loves :)
Speaking of mistakes. In 2021 and 2022 France needed a lot of help from their neigbours to keep the lights on, while a huge part of the French nuclear fleet was under maintenance...
France decides themselves at what price electricity is sold to the competition. It is a way to subsidize electricity prices in France.
France still produces electricity with fossil fuels and these prices went through the roof.
Hello there. Frenc historian here. The nuke and hydro mix is from De Gaulle and Pierre mesmer who had plans about it since 1961. The war in 1973 just forced VGE to applie the plan of Mesmer.
“Shut down your own energy supply to become dependent on a hostile country”
-Sun Tzu
Indeed it's stupid that France is so heavily reliant on nucler energy that it had to rely on importing energy from Germany in 2022 to not have a failing power grid. Luckily Germany has a diverse energy production that consists of 50% renewable energy and that enables Germany to be the largest energy exporteur in the world. Many European countries couldn't support their energy grid if Germany wasn't supplying them.
@@moos5221 50% renewable sounds cool only until you ask yourself what constitutes the other 50%...
My diet may consist of 50% healhy food, but it won't matter if the other 50% are all fries and mayo.
Weren't those major energy exports achieved by burning a buttload of coal?
And weren't german houses heated to only about 15°C last winter so that their economy survives without ruZZian gas?
@@user-bw6jg4ej2m lol, where do you get your propaganda from? all homes were heated as usual, unless people tried to save more energy, but that was on their own accord then. i've had 23°C all winter in my house and we didn't even deplete half the gas storage that was completely full going into the winter. it's already full again by the way. Germany had to use more coal then expected in winter 22/23 because of Frances nuclear power plant outages, so yeah, Germany had around 20-30% of it's energy production from coal, this would have been less if Germany didn't need to supply 26TWh of electricity to Austria, France, Switzerland and Luxembourg which were not able to supply for themselves. For comparision, the USA has 8% nuclear, 12% renewable, 11% coal, 36% oil and 32% gas in their electricity power mix. not sure where you are from, but i doubt you have any moral high ground over Germany. I'm happy Germany is independant from Russia now and can still supply it's neighbor countries. Hopefully France will get their act together and stop energy imports from Russia aswell as support their own population. Same goes for the USA, hope they can soon provide for their own and aren't depending on energy imports from Canada and Mexico in the future - and solve the nuclear waste storage problem.
@@moos5221 Germany is currently the shittiest place in Western Europe in terms of CO2 emissions per kWh by far. You don't have a leg to stand on. An average of about 400 g/kWh (France is at about 70 for comparison, and most of the other countries of Western Europe are between 200 and 300.
You should be ashamed, not proud. Energiewende is the most foolish and biggest joke I ever heard, and the only thing it produced was the inclusion of methane in the UE green taxonomy and more emissions. As an environmentalist, this is just despicable, horrifying that the destino of the green transizione is in the hands of such imbeciles as the german leadership
@@moos5221 "Germany had to use more coal than expected in winter 22/23 because of France's nuclear power plant outages" Um, are you forgetting about a certain war that forced Germany off of Russian oil, due to Russia using it to strong-arm Europe into not supporting Ukraine? But here you're pretending it's because of French nuclear plant output, while saying THEY (the person you're replying to) is the one going by propaganda? You may as well be waving a Green Party flag around in this comment section, you've just been going by your own propaganda.
I'd love to hear a conversation between you and Kyle Hill on the subject of nuclear power. I believe he is not exactly pro nuclear power but has worked to remove much of it's stigma
Kyle Hill is extremely pro nuclear power, viewing it as the clean, stable energy it can be and working constantly to destigmatize it.
@@andreifilip6364 Recently he's stated something along the lines of what I've said. Otherwise I would 100% agree with you
He's pro nuclear but acknowledges the need to respect the power of the atom.
@@HanmaHeiro He's 100% on payroll
@@user-cc32vcg811 He's 100% on big pharma payroll for sure.
*One important note regarding aging nuclear reactors. Before a nuclear reactor start operating the power plant has to get a license from the country's nuclear regulatory authority to operate it for a fixed number of years, let's say 20 years. Before this license expires the plant has to make a choice to renew the license or decommission the reactor. If they choose the former option they have to prove to the regulators that the reactor can safely operate for the next period, let's say another 20 years, which includes upgrading control and safety systems, replacing aging equipment, doing extensive inspections on critical components, etc. Just because a reactor is 40+ years it doesn't mean it only conforms to safety standards from 40 *
"I am once again askin you yo watch the entire video before commenting."
No. 🗿
I didn't even go past the 6th second 🗿🗿
I just know that in Italy we don't have nuclear power because if two referendums, but we import nuclear energy from France and Switzerland, and rest assured that in the case of a nuclear disaster in FR or CH we would be very much involved. So what's even the point, why can't we use commercial nuclear reactors?
Excellent video. A few additions:
- The power grid in the EU is well connected and coordinated, so Germany's and France's extremes seem to stabilize it
- The Merkel cabinet first weakened the mentioned nuclear power exit pushed by the green party, but backed down after Fukushima
- In Germany, the search for a nuclear waste disposal site has been going on for 20 years now and no end is in sight
- There have been lots of concerns in the regions that profit from coal mining in Germany about ceasing coal-based power generation
And still, the French have to pay the energy bills of the Germans since the war in Ukraine. (oversimplified statement)
I like to add that france has to import all of the uranium and is depending on failed states like Mali?
@@logipilot Australia and Canada are failed states?
Stop reading African BS...
Honestly, the waste issue is the biggest hurdle, with Asse 2 and Gorleben being a thorn in the eye of many a german "green". We always think "oh look, no carbon emissions" but forget that it does bring other problems with it as well. It's a tragedy Germany squandered their lead in solar power development to China, as they won't inovate further.
Turns out, the vast majority of waste is low level and/or decays quickly. But for the smaller amount of highly radioactive byproducts, my favorite idea is pretty new, but very simple. A company wants to use oil well drilling equipment to bore holes about as deep as possible into the earth's crust. They've demonstrated using simulations that it would never be able to leak to the surface or even groundwater and would remain safe even if it was directly impacted by an earthquake.
As French citizen living in Germany I can see both side of the problem. You did a very good video, you could also have talk about the issue with decommissioning power plant: coal VS nuclear have huge differences on this matter, as it is almost impossible to completely disassemble nuclear power plant, and it get worse as plant are aging. Same goes for nuclear waste, the salt mine disaster in Germany was a good example how complicated it can be. And finally, alternatives at the end of the video, you could have talked about the fusion project ITER.
ITER won’t make a dent in any statistics till in many many years.
A good solution for nuclear waste would be an European solution. Or using the current waste for modern types of reactors - as Bill Gates is promoting (in his documentary).
we can't rely on the expectation of fusion being the thing that save us, fusion will be for or children, or more realistically, our grandchildren. by them it will be way too late. we need to think about what we can do now.
Nuclear powerplants can be completely decomissioned just like any other civilian structure. Never powerplants are easier to decomission because they were designed with decomissioning in mind and because we are gaining more experience. The costs of waste manegment and decomissioning are negligible, less than 5 % of the electricity price.
@@vaclavzajac214 It's funny how you know the cost of something is negligible when no one actually knows how to actually do this something.
5% of electricity price? Where did you get that number from? If you dump barrels in the Atlantic like USA did in the 70’s then yeah, sure, it’s cheap. But if you retreat, contains and store for half a million year then no, it ain’t gonna be cheap, mister 5%
the far left when they see a stable job economy: you know what, i don't like this very much
Replacing nuclear with brown coal is like being scared that your scented candels will burn down your house so you replace it with an open fire in the living room
There was a difference in priotity that lead to this whole thing.
The reason why people were against nuclear power are safety issues and nuclear waste.
Going by that, the goal was reached.
That this goal caused an increase in fossil fuel energy production is terrible but that just was lower priority than the danger and waste of NPP
@@einherjar4902 There is already a lot of scientific research on reducing the life span on nuclear waste and it looks very promissing. Germany could have bern part of this reseach, but they're becoming increasingly anti-science. They'd rather go back to stone and than to work in modern solutions by supporting science and research.
@hewdelfewijfe its all politics.
When fukushima happened people in germany were extremely anti nuclear. Trust in the npp's being run properly were at 0.
Very well made... but dissappointing that you did not mention the issue of nuclear waste storage which was a major argument in densly populated Germany, also rivers are not providing enough cooling water to plants in France because they are suffering under the consequences of climate change
Because literally every source is sufering with climate change? Also, nuclear waste can be stored SAFELY underground, in the surface or recycled
@@joaquimbarbosa896 As of the Asse attempt, Germany has a terrible track record with nuclear waste being "stored SAFELY underground", rusting through the containers and contaminating the groundwater. The US don't have any kind of solid solution, either, and neither does France.
@@nekkowe France literally recycles it, hows that not a solid solution? And Germany doing nuclear bad is not nuclear's fault, its Germany's fault. The US never had much problems with nuclear waste btw, and it really did save a lot on any other type of waste including from renewables
Great advice at the end. I've been working for 9 years as phd student, lecturer and postdoc in Germany and here are my top 2 tips:
1) Studying is not about passing exams, but rather about becoming an engineer. Focus on that.
2) Everyone else at the same age is working 40h per week and you should do the same (but enjoy your flexibility 😉)
Yeah unfortunately you need papers (e.g. diploma) to do the job, regardless of your abilities and real experience. I switched from software engineering to chemistry enterpreneurship and I won't be able to do the job in future (thanks to EU banning more and more basic chemicals) even though I have my own equipped lab and paid and learned everything myself. But pity, I don't have the PAPERS ...
So I applied for university and they rejected me for my grades from TWENTY YEARS aho being too low... now I hate the system so much. You can know more than the students, you can even have a working business in the field, learn everything by yourself and it still not enough just because you have C instead of B from chemistry some 20 years ago, when you had no clue about your life purpose and being filled with hormones...
@@dim2389 Burnout. Too much work, then I could not work anymore even tiny bit. After 16 years of non-stop working programming made me sick just thinking about it. I was making numerical optimization library and photo stitching, then one day something snapped in my head and I could not work anymore, having 1 000s emails from customers I just could not keep up...
I never cared about AI it was boring even at university (learning Prolog and stuff like that). I like Bitcoin but I would never contribute to it actively apart from running my own bitcoin and Lightning node.
@@dim2389 Another reason is that programming was extremely unrewarding, endless streams of bugs and feature requests. With chemistry I can make dyes, extracts and people actually see the results and finally I have at least some recognition from friends. I can put photos of my makings on social networks - try posting a piece of code - no one will like it...
With programming you had just money and nothing else. Now I don't have any money but still being happier than sitting 20 hours a day before computer.
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In Australia its different.
The grid is already 45% renewable.
Nuclear would be 20 years away as regulations dont allow it.
Renewables are 30-50%cheaper than coal, which is 30%the cost of nuclear per unit of electricity.
Most coal plants are at end of life in 5-10years.
Almost certainly the grid will be mainly renewables.
I feel like one very overlooked topic is the capacity factor of each power source. Yes nuclear power is more expensive than renewables, but as they are today, nuclear has a capacity factor of near 90%, while wind and solar are closer to 30%.
1,000 MW of solar might be a lot cheaper than 1,000 MW of nuclear, but nuclear will be producing power most of the time while wind and solar won’t.
I hope batter storage options allow wind and solar power to go further, and it seems like that should improve in the future.
I have my doubts on the storage front. It seems a massive challenge to find a suitable replacement for many of the rare metals in batteries (including lithium). Amd mechanical means of energy storage are much less efficient. Batteries are definitely improving, but they are not becoming more eco friendly due to this relationship with rare metals. So a truly eco-friendly energy buffer for most renewables isn't going to happen in the near future.
And even if you do improve storage you still have to overbuild your grid significantly in order to have enough excess during high production hours to fill your buffers.
In my view, the best usecase for solar/wind/etc is for small, more remote energy production.
Nuclear power plants often achieve 98+% capacity factors. Solar ranges from 18-35%, with the low end applying to places like Germany or UK, and the high end applying to Algeria. There is no place in Northern Europe where solar power makes any sense, in economic terms or even in carbon reduction terms (it takes a lot of energy to make and dispose of solar panels).
In France, Nuclear is more about 68 %. It's nice, but due to a lot of maintenance the factor is reduce a little more each year.
@@Elphealer France has let their plants get old and run down. In the US, nuclear has averaged 99% capacity over the last 30 years. It’s possible the French design is less reliable.
@hewdelfewijfe hmm my bad I probably miss this two concepts
A message from a Brazilian mechanical engineer: your videos are amazing!
A Brazilian?? Wow! I can't even count up to a Million!
Oh! The modular nuclear plants also sound like they could be safer, so you could phase out any outdated or unsafe modules while replacing them with new ones. Thanks so much for the in-depth video! I just found your channel and i love everything I've seen so far!
Even the older ones are safe. Not one person has died in the U.S. from a nuclear power accident.
@@bearclaw5115(Except for military use once)
One of the potential issues that has been brought up with the smaller, modular power plants, is that they will produce more waste/MWH than a single larger reactor. Ex, 1 5GW reactor might produce 5 tons of waste over it's life, whereas the 5 1GW reactors might produce 7.5 tons. Numbers pulled out of thin air, and actual waste numbers vary. Disposing of the waste is our "next issue," despite the fact that many solutions already exist. In fact, there are actually Nuclear Reactors that produce power that can be used to dispose of other reactors waste material. Molten Thorium Salt Reactors, like the one that ran for decades at Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
The other option, one that I personally like, was very well discussed by another TH-camr, who has done a whole series of videos on Nuclear Power, and many Nuclear accidents, such as Goiania, Castle Bravo, and Lia. Also Chernobyl and Fukushima. But a suggested disposal method was basically using the deep well drilling tech from the oil and gas industries to make bore-holes about 1 mile deep, far enough below to have multiple multiple layers of safety margins, "drop" the waste in the hole in casks, then fill the hole with concrete. Assuming Real Engineering doesn't mind, I'll attach a link to the video in another reply.
Kyle Hill's video: We Solved Nuclear Waste Years Ago:
th-cam.com/video/4aUODXeAM-k/w-d-xo.html
I believe this adds to the conversation of micro/modular reactors.
Modular nuclear plants are sadly not developed enugh, they are a feaseable tecnology by technical terms, but their price is still to high. Even more high thn building just a normal reactor
Myan tht ad placement is devious