Blippo
-18
6
Blippo has not written any posts yet.
Ok, you got me on my lack of precision and missing sources. Estimates like "billions of Euros" and "hundreds of tons" are horribly vague and not a proper base for discussion.
To walk back my reputation I want to add this link: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-g-n/germany.aspx which provides a lot of hard facts. According to this report Germany hast to manage 11.500 metric tons of nuclear fuel. There's a state fund of 23.6 billion € for managing the waste. Also the energy companies have put back 38 billion € to build back the German reactors. "Millions of years" was plain wrong, spent nuclear fuel has half-lives as high as 24,000 years, which is not nothing but... (read more)
Most readers will agree the term "ugh fields" describes the avoidance part of basic procrastination. Finding an brand level scientific term for it with an emotional storytelling soundbite with only three letters is the part that needs to be acknowlegded here – kudos ... but flattery, ugh, read next article.
The waste makes nuclear power too risky and thus too expensive if you think long-term.
In Germany we have the situation that the country backs out from nuclear power completely. That desicion has been made by the German government after the Fukushima incident and because Germany is so densely populated that an incident like Fukushima would impact all of Europe. Other countries next door, like France, who also has to keep up a nuclear arsenal, will keep producing nuclear power. I'm pretty sure that the possibility to build nukes is the one big argument for keeping and subsidizing a nuclear power industry at all.
The main political issue and the elephant in the room... (read more)
Buerocracy seems to be tedious at times, but in my opinion it's quite efficient.
Most buerocratic rituals still serve a purpose. There are a lot of decisions to be made by people and they simply want to follow an algorithm. Or a checklist. To do that without friction, people want to normalize their input, that's why everyone insists on the right form. It's standardization.
Let's have a look where buerocracy is happening: when dealing with money. Nobody wants to be responsible, so everybody is trying to secure a paper trail that proves they made the right decision.
Buerocracy is complementing (or weeding out) the human factor, by it's narrow-minded nature. It enables to make decisions based on the effort someone has put into his credentials.
Humans equipped with buerocracy are harder to game with sheer salesmanship and less prone to simple errors.
8/8 (Serenity)
Germany has no functioning long-term repository for high-level nuclear waste. The search for a permanent site has dragged on for decades. Because Germany is densely populated, there are no remote areas where waste could be stored far from people. Every proposed site triggers fierce local resistance (“Not in my backyard”). Temporary storage in mine shafts proved to be unreliable and very expensive to maintain. When Germany decided on the nuclear phase-out, the government negotiated a one-off payment from the nuclear plant operators (E.ON, RWE, EnBW, Vattenfall). In exchange, the operators were freed from their long-term liability for nuclear waste storage. Future costs are now on taxpayers.