And furthermore, one of the big arguments in Germany against nuclear energy is that they haven't yet worked out how or where to store the waste.

If you shut down and dismantle plants that have not yet reached the end of their lifecycle, you are actually creating a lot of nuclear waste prematurely and so adding to the storage problem.

Surely it would be better to keep the plants whole and working until the problem of the waste is sorted.

The Greens are playing a double game here. On the one hand they are demanding early dismantlement of the plants and on the other they are blocking all solutions for storage and disposal. So in other words, they are leaving no alternative to costly and dangerous tempoarry storage dumps.

Sorry, but you are getting a couple of things mixed up:
- there are different levels of nuclear waste. The one which is the big worry is the highest level... the used up rods of extremely radioactive fuel used in a reactor.
- the longer you use your reactor, the more of that stuff you produce.


The Swiss reactors are some of the oldest running reactors on the planet. The problem with radioactivity is that while you cannot see it does it erode materials including even reinforced concrete. Beznau 1 had over 1000 micro fractures in the pressure chamber, but is back online anyways. Running a reactor longer does not mean you are doing something ecologically, but raising the risks for an accident. Beznau is believed to be the third worst reactor to cope with an accident (on the planet, only a block in Armenia and one in Taiwan are worse...).


I am critical of nuclear energy, but if you do want to use it... do it in the safest way possible. That means build a new reactor every 30 years or so. Most Swiss one are from the late 60s and early 70s. Japan has shown that we cannot rely on the energy companies to prioritize safety, they clearly rather keep old machines running and cash in. In Europe are probably only the Belgians doing worse than the Swiss reactors. And I am including eastern Europe here...

Most of the waste problem is concerned with the lower levels of waste, which are being produced in far larger volumes.

Things like rods can be reprocessed to a certain degree.

Things like concrete and other construction crap containing low to medium levels of radioactivity cannot be recycled in any way and this is the stuff that fills most of the space in the storage sites.

Furthermore, the big challenge with storage is not the level of radioactivity. It's the half life. Stuff with short half lifes can just be held in temporary storage until safe to dump in the normal trash or something. Independently of whether it is strongly or only weakly radioactive. But stuff with long half lives cannot be treated like that. It needs to be stored safely for a very long times. In this respect you don't differentiate between something with high levels of radiation and something that is just marginally over a limit.

The point of nuclear was that it was allegedly cheap and clean... your post sounds like its actually neither if you do calculate the full costs. ;-)

Premature abandonment doesn't recover past expenditure, but it does curtail the income you can get by selling the electricity while bringing forward the problems and costs of decommisioning.

So it's the worst of all possible solutions economically.

"Stormy Daniels arrested in Ohio"

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-44804597

Tom

<<Ms Daniels was arrested for allegedly letting a customer touch her on stage "in a non sexual manner">>
Now that is totally inappropriate for a porn-star, right?

If this is a set up it won't change a thing for Trump - but of course Trump has his own logic ....

I cant believe that the US has a president that shags porn stars, but I somehow still cannot stand him...

well if you look at it only as a power generation endeavour, then maybe.

however, when viewed as partly military research/capability spend, then it may look different.

Sorry, but a nuclear power station build in the 60s is absolutely useless for research or military use. The PSI in Aargau stored enough weapons grade plutonium for a couple of bombs for decades till they finally got rid of it in 2016...

Is that worse than a President which shoved a cigar up an intern?

No, its way cooler. But id argue that the Russian hookers paid to pee on the bed Obama slept in are a bit on the weird side...

https://news.sky.com/story/live-trum...a-lot-11434086

Pity.

Tom

There are other aspects to be considered. If for instance Mühleberg blows up, Bern is probably toast because the main wind direction is from west-northwest so it would be directly in the cloud's path.

But that sort of thing only happens once in a thousand years... or so we have been told. Except that it happened at least three times in the last 70. And I am not even counting all the weapons the Americans lost. (The Russians probably as well, but we never heard about it...)

The logic here seems to be, If Spanky is bad then Clinton must be good, however Clinton had an affair therefore Clinton is bad, therefore Spanky is good.


Genius.

er no.

it's just showing that in both cases there is a lot of faked shock and anger at a revelation that actually in the bigger picture of things doesn't really matter.

I think thats overly generous, it's just whataboutism and whataboutism from the last century at that, at least 'whatabouttheHilaryEmails' is current.

But times change, don't they? In the 90s the public opinion about morality was different than it is today, and Clinton was looked down on for his actions. Back then no one would have been elected if they acted how Trump does. Today it's another story and people will not care or be surprised if Trump has an affair while in office.