There are interesting documentations about this topic.
Basically, you need to plan 1000s of years into the future.
I'm not sure whether there is even one plan that worked for 1k years... I mean... Hitler tried it... He called it "1000-jähriges Reich".. It lasted a few years. Anyway....
How do you want to warn the humans that live here in 4k years about what is down there? They will speak a totally different language. Do you want to use signs? Where do you put them? You do you make sure, they last 1000s of years?
It's actually not that easy.
In Germany, they tried to find an "Endlager" (a final storage place) for it, but all options have been classified as not good enough at a later point. Additionally, the people here go on the streets when you tell them that you store that stuff in their village or city.
You don't need to plan "1000's of years into the future." Why does Nuclear require a multi-generational plan on a scale that no civilization has ever attained, but burning fossil fuels which will kill most of us within a few generations doesn't? It's a distraction, the solution to nuclear waste was solved in the 50's and the reality is that dangerous nuclear waste is useful and should be recycled, and the low-order nuclear waste isn't dangerous for anymore then a century at most, and even then it's only if you consume it.
the solution to nuclear waste was solved in the 50’s and the reality is that dangerous nuclear waste is useful and should be recycled
We in Germany expect to have 10.500 tons of highly radioactive waste until 2080. And you are telling me that there is a solution already? Then why don't the people with the solution just take the radioactive waste of Germany and recycle it?
Conclusion: There is no "ready-for-production", permanent solution for this problem yet.
10.500 tons of highly radioactive waste until 2080
Ok, but in 2022 alone Germany emitted 746 000 000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. I'll take the 10.500 of easily containable waste over 60 years, please. In fact, let's do 5x that. Or even 10x.
The amount of electricity generated from fossil and conventional energy sources fell by 12.2% in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period of the previous year. The largest decline, at 22%, was measured in power generation from coal. Coal-fired power plants fed in a total of 17.3 billion kWh less than in the previous year. Nuclear power generation has also declined due to the shutdown of the last 3 nuclear power plants. Nuclear power plants still fed 6.7 billion kWh of electricity into the grid in the first half of 2023 and thus contributed 3% to the electricity mix. Electricity generation from natural gas fell by 4.1% compared to the same period last year
No, it really does not. That compares power generation mix, not total capacity, over the same periods of different years, which you can't interpret in a vacuum. Look at the neighbouring countries' data so you can normalise the data and analyse it properly. It may very well be that total power generation in the period they're comparing is down overall due to a warmer winter. So it stands to reason that so would fossil fuels.
If you want to interpret it properly, we can go over it, but it won't tell you much about what we're talking about. The matter is that while we're in a fullblown climate crisis, and what we're doing is insufficient, they reopened coal plants:
And none of it would be necessary had they not closed their very well performing NPPs.
We need to be doing everything we can to decarbonise, and I honestly don't understand why we keep having this 60 year old discussion, the same as the previous generations that have led us to this point. It really only serves so that fossil fuel magnates can keep lining their pockets as the world burns. Somehow they've convinced people that nuclear is competition for renewables instead of complementary, it's really incredible to me.
Your first link is almost one year old. They did indeed prepare for a worst case, which didn't occur after all. Coal and gas consumption (total, not just percentage wise) did not go up, but down instead.
Yes, a mild winter helped. Unfortunately, winters are getting warmer and warmer, and the last one was no exception there.
So why is your country's emissions per capita more than 50% higher than France's (from here), despite a much higher renewables percentage in the power mix? Might it have something to do with how much more nuclear they have?
Looking through your post history, we seem to be aligned in advocating for decarbonisation. If you really want to reach zero emissions as soon as possible, don't you think we should be exploring every carbon free avenue, and shutting down every single fossil fuel power plant?
Don't fall for your government's justifications, or fearmongering around nuclear. If we want to decarbonise the grid, we need it to complement renewables and fill the roles that renewables can't by themselves. The longer we take to realise that, the longer we'll keep burning greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
don’t you think we should be exploring every carbon free avenue, and shutting down every single fossil fuel power plant?
Sure. But nuclear is probably not the answer: we don't have those decades left it takes to build hundreds of new plants. Not to mention the astronomical cost. The ship had sailed 30 years ago.
Edit: the last 3 nuclear plants we shut down this year had a combined capacity of around 4 GW. In 2022 we installed over 7 GW of solar and about 2.5 GW of wind capacity (this year it will probably significantly more)
I'm not paying €79/month to review the whole statistics, but you know perfectly well that France started from a much lower number. They already had nuclear when we started to roll out renewables on a large scale. Are you by any chance familiar with the term "head start"?
But decisions from 40 years ago are irrelevant for decisions today. Spilled milk.
It's called nuclear reprocessing and it was banned as a compromise between the USSR and the USA because it can also be used to make weapons. The USSR is gone now, and any country that wants to do it is more then welcome to withdraw from the nuclear reprocessing treaty. They can do it unilaterally without any risk at all and that takes care of their existing and future high-order nuclear waste in one fell-swoop.