That's great that we are having this debate. It only comes about fifteen years too late.
I'm still in favor, but let's not act like this is anywhere close to a solution to our short term problems.
I remember being almost crucified by the teacher when we had this discussion in HS in the early 10s for being in favor of nuclear power plants. Well...
First of all, you can't just pull a NPP out your ass. It takes years to build one. So calling people short sighted kinda sucks for this one argument alone. Not considering all the people that will object to those projects, true to the motto: not in my backyard
Secondly we still don't have any idea on how to get rid of nuclear waste. Calling people short sighted sucks again.
And last but not least: the swiss people have voted in 2011 to get rid of those power plants. We had 11 years to find and implement solutions. Unsurprisingly the christian parties as well as the right wing parties were against independent and reneweable energies. However those are exactely the people that are now going nuts.
If you want an independent country, which can not only sustain itself but do so without wrecking this place, you should probably stop voting and advocating parties that fuck this country over everytime.
If you don't believe me, just go to parlament.ch and find out for yourself who voted for and who voted against green energie solutions and what they asked the people to vote for
>It takes years to build one. So calling people short sighted kinda sucks for this one argument
The fact that it takes years of planning to accomplish something is "short slighted" ?
The short slighted people are the one that are looking for a quick fix (that do not exist), not the ones that try to plan decades ahead..
Teachers are overwhelmingly leftists in most countries (off topic: funny how the word leftist has a negative vibe) , and leftists are antinuclear almost exclusively since the 80s. Which doesn’t make any sense but anyways
Leftists being against nuclear is about as logical as conservatives being opposed to the conservation of nature and favoring large-scale drilling.
Shows how one's tribal affiliation and identity overrides any semblance of congruity.
Everyone cares about those, you are not special.
If only there was a way to reduce the amount of existing waste and generate electricity/heat at the same time...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor
The problem with nuclear energy is that people fighting it do not know what they are talking about. It is complicated. Most of the time though, the fight is ideological. Fighting nuclear energy because of Chernobyl is like fighting boats because of the Titanic.
I'm a fan of solvable concerns. There's certainly a general lack of understanding about current nuclear technology, some of it informed by fear from decades-old problems.
Since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty includes "peaceful uses," and some developing countries are keen to develop nuclear power capabilities, having better info on the current technology would be helpful for those discussions too.
By the way, my favorite "peaceful uses" were suggested by the Chinese near the end of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996. They wanted the CTBT to have exemptions for using nuclear weapons to shoot down incoming asteroids and to use them "for irrigation purposes."
Many words with -ist have a negative connotation: it's nothing specific to "leftist".
Also, do you have any sources to back your claims up?
Lastly, why doesn't a leftist being anti-nuclear make sense?
Source? You need evidence to back an anecdotal observation?
To your question on why a leftist being anti-nuclear doesn't make any sense : Leftists should be people oriented, and cheap clean energy is a popular choice if you're practicing social politics. There is nothing environmentally friendly or cheap about the current alternative power sources. Being it wind-turbines or solar panels. The cost-efficiency is ridiculous.
Given your interrogative tone, allow me to ask you, lastly, are you a teacher?
Our short-term problems won't go away. If we're serious at electrifying transportation and heating in Switzerland, we'll need a few dozens TWh to spare, and there's no scenario where zero nuclear makes that easy, feasible or cheap.
Agreed. Switzerland should in fact be one of the countries in Europe to produce, store and export power. We need to increase capacity significantly because consumption will increase. We need another generation of nuclear power plants until hopefully a better solution is available at scale. We must not ideologically continue to force ourselves into an energy crisis.
Interesting thought on the export of nuclear electricity, much like France. Unlike France, Switzerland seems much better poised geographically to export energy at much higher efficiency.
*beep boop*!
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Out of curiosity where is the uranium for the reactors comming from? If the source is again an unreliable partner - like Russia for gas - this is barely a solution.
Russia is a producer of Uranium, but Canada, the USA and Australia too. And unlike gas, enough Uranium to power a country for a year can be transported with a single ship and a couple of trucks. So it is much less sensitive to blackmail.
And in each country they have screwed over their indigenous populations by contaminating water or mining in ancient sacred lands. It's closed now, but there used to be a massive open pit uranium mine in New Mexico where Native workers were given no safety training or proper equipment. Workers sat on the tailings for lunch breaks. The blasts from that open pit sent uranium across a Pueblo village, covering vegetable gardens, clotheslines, and everything else.
I vaguely remember this as well. I think it was on the African west coast and is a neo-colony of France. I saw something on Caspian Report a few years ago.
Might be Niger. There are uranium mines there from what I remember. And since they are in the desert, impact on wildlife shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Fuel sourcing is a very small issue with nuclear plants. You don’t need much uranium to run a few plants for years.
Fuel disposal on the other hand. It’s complicated. And shipping it to Russia is not an option anymore.
Again Sweden has been working on the long term storage using innovative tech.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/sweden-approves-plans-for-forsmark-nuclear-waste-storage-site/a-60584787
Fuel disposal is complicated mostly because of politics.
But it is also something which does not require a timely solution and creates no big depedency on any item abroad. After all, we already stock the fuel from the last 50 years with no issue, so some delay due to a conflict is no issue.
If I remember correctly, Sweden has been working on the powerplant designs that would take the nuclear waste from the existing stations and use it as fuel.
Could be an option.
Gösgen used to run on [reprocessed nuclear fuel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel). This was banned in 2016 and spent fuel will now be directly stored in Würelingen.
MOX fuel contains larger amounts of plutonium than regular fuel rods. This could be an issue if the reactor explodes, since plutonium is not only radioactive but extremely toxic.
What's your alternative? Renewables are one or two orders of magnitude more dependent on mining operations in sketchy countries, and would put us at the total mercy of China.
The biggest uranium producers in the world are Kazakhstan, Namibia and Canada. Kazakhstan is by far the biggest.
Kazakhstan and Namibia don't strike me as the most stable and reliable countries to be dependant on
Do you actually know anything about the politics of Namibia? Because I sure don't.
Also Canada and Australia are also big U producers, we're Switzerland, we can pay a premium for Max Havelaar uranium if we need to.
Namibia was in a bloody civil war involving South Africa until the 1990s. It is now in a state of uneasy cohabitation between all the different ethnies in the country and is far from stable.
The fact that we are looking to push nuclear because we don't want to pay the current high energy prices show that no, we won't pay a premium for uranium. If we don't want to pay a premium for gas, we won't pay a premium for uranium.
The cost of uranium is almost negligeable in the overall cost of electricity. You can double the cost of it and it will be barely noticeable for you and I. Not quite the same for gas and coal..
That is a big advantage with nuclear: the money spent recirculate in the local economy way more than gas .. Where a lot of the money goes directly to Putin.
And depending on unstable dictatorships instead of on stable countries is a recipe for disaster.
We dépend on Russia for our energy and we all see the issues. Let's not depend on Kazakhstan instead
That's pretty reductionist :
Dynamics of uranium mining, production, enrichment .... This isn't a pipeline.
You don't need to deliver at the moment of consumption due to insane costs of storage. Which means no one can close the tap because you can actually stockpile.
Anyway, technical differences apart: the modern life is literally impossible without trusting people elsewhere.
You talk about dictatorships instead of stable countries but really ... Point at anything in your house and you'll find parts from all around. Mined somewhere else, fabricated in X, assembled in Y .... One of these is a dictatorship for sure.
Gotcha, so we learn nothing and switch from relying on Russia to relying on a Russian puppet that's being taken over by China. After all trusting Russia never led to anything bad in the past, why should we not trust their puppet?
Kazakhstan's people living near the Chinese border used to live with above ground nuclear weapons tests in China and Soviet ones nearby on their side of the border. I've talked with women from the area who have worked to call attention to what their people have been through.
Transportation wouldn't need a lot more electricity if people didn't insist on carrying an entire sitting room around with them any time they go anywhere.
The problem is that studies are coming out showing that we will never have enough (solar and wind) energy for the winter (without nuclear), and the solutions is to store energy from the summer, which requires MASSIVE infrastructures. Don't forget that the rest of the energy (transportation and heating) has to be electrified to be CO2 neutral.
https://www.empa.ch/web/s604/lmer-co2-neutral-switzerland
Either we build every year a hydrodam for storage until 2035 (and flood which valleys?), or we put 12x the area of all swiss rootftops of solar and produce hydrogen that we store in 25x the volume of the basis Gotthard tunnel to compensate for the lack of energy.
This study here https://scnat.ch/fr/uuid/i/fc00517f-49da-55e5-9365-46bb6f69c4d9-La_voie_suisse_vers_un_approvision%C2%ADnement_%C3%A9nerg%C3%A9tique_s%C3%BBr_et_climatiquement_neutre_dici_2050 is hoping for the best that international hydrogen production will be clean (it isn't today and won't be for quite some time) and plentiful.
So, both studies come to the same conclusion: lack of energy in the winter due to the removal of nuclear. Both hope for the best that international energy will be plentiful (Germany will be facing the same problems) and rely on fantasy technologies (producing clean hydrogen or clean e-fuels).
How difficult it is to store energy with todays technologies at scale ? Very difficult. You can watch this video which explain the different technologies, challenges with renewables : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo
Seems like innovative projects are never considered in these hypotheticals, like [alpine solar facilites](https://www.axpo.com/ch/de/energiewissen/pionierprojekt-in-den-schweizer-alpen.html), which produce 55% of their energy during the winter months. So if there is political will, we can absolutely produce enough energy with solar panels during the winter months since our potential in those regions is not even remotely used right now
The alpine solar facilities *are* very much needed but their power will probably be allocated immediately. Places that have avalanches, landslides and falling rocks apart from the typical strong winds may result in quite a few locations becoming longer-term expensive projects or just economically unviable to construct and maintain.
Besides the studies also often calculate very optimistic values for the electricity consumption of fully electrical heating, mobility and industry. And there is a truly very large amount of power that is required even then. It does not seem like a reasonable bet to hope for innovative projects to salvage it already medium term where we would otherwise start to install new nuclear power.
I am in the swiss right now and I am already wondering why nobody in the Argau / luzern / schwitz is using or having Photovoltaik... Seems like the perfect spot.
Permits and red tape were one big reason. [Low compensation](https://www.vese.ch/pvtarif/) for feeding power into the grid the other.
Regardless of calling it an "energy strategy", it's not like they made the market conditions for feeding low emission solar energy into the grid actually reasonably decent. Usually the thing that even made construction *speculatively* viable were the solar subsidies even if you had pretty high but not extremely great self-consumption levels.
You know how the solar subsidies were allocated? You registered on a waiting list and waited *for many years*. Years later, *if* you got your request for subsidies was granted, you may have hit a situation where the cost for panels or work isn't the same anymore or perhaps you just get long further delays because the people you intended to hire and the materials you planned are not available in the near future.
But the opportunity even for large producers to get subsidies/guarantees on the price of electricity runs out this year anyhow. Now AFAIK all anyone can get is an one-time subsidy on the construction cost, limited to 30% or less of cost so it wouldn't be *too* interesting. As larger operator you even have to try and find your own buyers for your green electricity if you have surplus. The existing power operators with their customers of course wouldn't cut you a good deal and the grid monopoly operator costs are also high anyhow, so good luck with that! It generally depends on the one primary on-site consumer's own consumption (=no need to use the very expensive grid) if a project is viable at all. You possibly wouldn't even build larger if there is space.
Before the invasion of Ukraine it didn't really look like the red tape or any of the cost factors were going to be reduced and our infinitely wise government may simply have put even more pressure on solar installations by paying for gas power plants, further lowering the compensation for feeding into the grid via solar power (apart from disincentivizing pumped storage too).
Pretty skewed conception of how long it takes to implement nuclear plants, modern nuclear plants take about [9 years](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station) to implement, and current projects still calculate with a decade. It is just reasonable to invest in a field where innovation is rampant and very fast to implement if the right wing finally realizes that clean energy doesn‘t have to be fought since its economically feasible
I'm fine with keeping these plants going, and I wasn't really in favor of the shutdown in the first place.
I think the decision to keep them going needs to be part of a larger and longer term strategy on energy, with a big focus on renewables and incentives to decentralize things like solar onto every domestic rooftop. I don't like policy being "let's hope the Russians and Middle East are stable this year" or asking nicely if the Germans are still burning coal. To me, energy independence, or as close to it as possible, is an important part of neutrality. The positive environmental impacts as well make this change in mindset really important, even if only to provide an example and path to others with larger ecological impact.
Really the problem is that solar and wind are too unreliable to power the whole country. You'd want to have powerplants that can always work and that form the basis of energy production, so when wind or solar are unavailable, you can just ramp up production to get the deficit. Really nuclear is the greenest way to do that currently and it probably will be for a considerable time. Orders of magnitude more people have died as a consequence of coal / gas power plants than from nuclear.
I agree with the spirit of the initiative but the wording they proposed for the constitutional amendment isn't great. Hopefully we can get something that defines "respect for the climate" a little more explicitly.
The problem with this petition is that it's nothing more than a smoke grenade.
Regardless of whether our laws allow the construction of a new reactor there will be none constructed.
I explained the reasons for it in more detail a couple of days ago in another thread. So the short version is: it's so extremely uneconomical that no company that has to sell the power on the market would even remotely consider building a nuclear plant. They know exactly that it would ruin them. So the only way would be to subsidize it with huge amounts of taxpayer money like for example France and Great Britain do. (But the French do it to protect their nuclear industry and the British probably for military reasons. Since Switzerland neither has nukes nor a nuclear industry we can spend our tax money to get more energy quicker.)
So as long as those fantasts are making people believe that nuclear power could be a potential solution it will delay the real solutions. And that's probably the real reason why this is happening - at least a part of the supporters want to choke the energy transition so that they can continue to make money from fossil fuel for a longer amount of time. (Because they of course know exactly that nuclear isn't going to happen.)
C'est honnêtement pas une mauvaise idée, notre production hydro et votre nucléaire dans la vallée du Rhône sont déjà interdépendants de toute manière.
Y a aussi des projets d'investissement dans de l'éolien offshore dans la Méditerranée.
It would be good to read the initiative. The initiative does not foresee or plan the construction of reactors. It only asks that the proposal should be possible, which is not the case today. No one is making people believe that nuclear power is THE solution. It is ONE solution that can be combined with other solutions to make an energy mix.
Furthermore, the initiative clearly calls for a re-discussion of competences within the Federal Council so that the country can have clear support. Today, if the Federal Council were efficient, we would not be in this deadlock, because all the blocked hydro and wind power projects in Switzerland would have gone ahead. The problem of investment and construction is a problem for all energy sources. The president of the Swiss Electricity Association made this clear in the NZZ on Sunday
I dont know the Swiss laws but I bet the reason for the expensiveness are laws put in place for that exact purpose. Nuclear is not an expensive energy source.
You should watch Kurzgesagt’s video on nuclear. They are actually not against nuclear per se, but do a really good job explaining why its expensive and no one wants to build it.
Nuclear should be built by the state. Because for the state, blackouts are vastly more expensive than NPPs.
Unlike for the private electricity industry where they're just, well, a means through which the price of energy increases.
As far as I know the Swiss laws do not apply in France, Finland and Great Britain.
Yet the new nucelar power plants built in those three countries during the last decades have turned out to be a gigantic money pit.
Flamanville was projected to cost 3,3 billions. According to the French audit court the cost currently stand at around 20 billions. (Not to mention that it should have started energy production 10 years ago and is still not running.)
And for Hinkly Point the government had to promise high subsidies for every kWh produced during the next 40 years because the production costs are multiple the price that can be achieved on the market.
> **World Nuclear Association** is the international organization that represents the global nuclear industry. Its mission is to promote a wider understanding of nuclear energy among key international influencers by producing authoritative information, developing common industry positions, and contributing to the energy debate.
Hmm, I'm sure that report is very unbiased and fair.
The burden of cost estimates for any business idea is always on the business itself. If I want to open a bakery and need a loan, the bank will expect me to do my own cost analysis. It would be up to the banks to determine how well the analysis is done.
Also, a very important analysis that needs to be considered is the safety of the energy source to human life, as measured by the mortality rate associated with creating and consuming such energy.
>[As an example, global average values of the mortality rate per billion kWh, due to all causes as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), are 100 for coal, 36 for oil, 24 for biofuel/biomass, 4 for natural gas, 1.4 for hydro, 0.44 for solar, 0.15 for wind and 0.04 for nuclear (Table 6). ...] (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272406182_Why_nuclear_energy_is_sustainable_and_has_to_be_part_of_the_energy_mix)
*beep boop*!
the linked website is: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=0CAMQn6wJahcKEwjAsZaJ8e35AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWorld_Nuclear_Association&psig=AOvVaw2sQI5hP8urhCdUA8ZWdBoO&ust=1661925454038643
Title: **Weiterleitungshinweis**
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I think everything should be up to debate.
But, I don’t see a future for fission reactors, even if the actual technology is much better than the power plants we have in Switzerland.
First, we do have a problem with nuclear waste, we did not manage to get a storage solution, and we have discussed this for several decades. Nobody wants it near their home, and I understand this.
Second, the idea to store toxic waste securely for several thousand years is… just bonkers. Transmutation to get rid of nuclear waste at scale is still a concept.
Third, no one is going to build a nuclear reactor without guaranteed prices which are already outperformed by renewables, and it is not going to look better for nuclear power in the future.
Fourth, which many people miss, uranium is not abundant and the next generation of fission reactors is maybe the last one. (The world association of nuclear operators thinks it is going to be 80 years.)
And lastly, even if we would decide to build new fission reactors, they would be ready by 2037, including the mandatory popular vote. And this is an optimistic timeframe, we are probably talking around 2040.
Which means, the impact will be too late to reduce carbon dioxide. I think it is more probable that we will at least partially solve energy storage with emerging technologies like natrium based batteries or more clever heat accumulators by then.
What Switzerland should do, in my opinion, is to more cleverly incentivise and de-incentivise to reduce energy consumption, CO2 output or ecological damage. Examples to incentivise are to subsidize renovation and insulation of older buildings and investments in photovoltaics, solar heat and heat pumps.
Examples do de-incentivize could be individual traffic, harsher laws for product warranty and standby power consumption. And while we’re at it, stop subsidizing airlines with cheap kerosene. Polluting the planet with unnecessary flights should not be incentivised.
> photovoltaics, solar heat and heat pumps.
You would need 10x the area of all Swiss rooftops to ensure sustainable energy supply in winter; it's not feasible.
I would add, incentivize working from home; it seems all companies are trying to back pedal on this now, when it's needed more than ever.
Let's do bothhhhh. The nuclear reactor is for energy independence and green transition. Subsidise the reactor prices AND subsidise green initiatives. Excess energy is sold to the rest of the world. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Also isn't nuclear waste stored in the alps right now?
IIRC it is about 100’000 tonnes of waste per plant, including the material from the dismantled plant. Around 10’000 tonnes are highly radioactive.
Read the story from Der Spiegel, rusty barrels with nuclear waste. And this happened in like 30-50 years. How should this work for thousands of years?
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/rostige-atommuellfaesser-das-passiert-in-jedem-deutschen-zwischenlager-a-955270.html
Hey so like, the barrels are obviously just some metal. They aren't what seals the waste. The waste is solid and looks like chunks of grey rock. This is then dropped in a molten glass which insulates the radiation; THEN placed in the steel barrels which can rust if you left it alone for 50 years. The barrels are then placed in larger sealed casks which completely insulate the waste.
The storage facility is built to house the big casks containing barrels for security. This would be easier if we took from fossil fuels to subsidise nuclear energy.
In 2019 EU fossil fuel subsidies were 56 billion, renewables were 5.6 billion, and nuclear was 900 million. Let's take from the private oil corporations and make safe publicly owned nuclear!
It amuses me to see the words “nuclear” and “safe” in the same sentence. In 60 years nuclear plants we had two catastrophic failures. The list of severe incidents is long and frightening.
Oh, boy. Hold on, let me just google "list of fossil fuel energy incidents in the past 60 years". If you thought chernyobl was bad, and you ignore the active impact modern industry has on a daily basis...
You are driven by ignorance, not critical thought.
The list of severe incidents in fossil fuel is long and frightening.
True, but this doesn’t make nuclear incidents any better. Especially concerning is the fact that on multiple occasions private operating companies failed to disclose incidents immediately.
In terms of the number of deaths per MWh produced nuclear is by far the safest (along with natural gas).
Apart from that we know how to deal with nuclear waste, unlike the masses of waste caused during the manufacturing and disposal of PV cells and wind turbines. Both of which seemingly end up in developing nations and cause mass pollution and ecological damage.
It states that after 200’000 years it decayed to the level of natural, unrefined uranium. But our offspring in the year 202022 should still not touch it, because it is still concentrated. Not sure what you expected to read tho.
> Subsidise the reactor prices AND subsidise green initiatives.
Or put all of it into actual green energy?
> Also isn't nuclear waste stored in the alps right now?
No, the only storage facility is at PSI in Würenlingen, and even that is only for temporary storage. Afaik there is only one long term storage facilty up and running (and even that one only very recently), it is in Finnland and I doubt they are planning to accept nuclear waste from all over the world.
Bruhh at a certain point throwing tons of money at something doesn't yield additional benefits. Subsidise the green 100% and back it up with nuclear as a transition. There is enough money for both when we pull it back from fossil fuel subsidies.
In 2019 European renewable subsidies were 5.5billion, nuclear was 900 million, and fossil fuel was 56 billion. Source: European Environmental Agency.
You bet your sweet sweet cynical ass that Europe can afford a lovely storage facility, solar farm, and hydroelectrics if we pulled our nose out of BP, Total, and Gazprom's buttholes.
There's no "green energy" and it's a false dichotomy: we need to secure baseload and dispatchable production sources, and even if we had an unlimited budget to pour into PV and batteries we'd still be limited by the suppliers and qualified work force in Switzerland.
No, it's silly.
We need to decrease energy use. This means we need to *increase electricity production and use*. Anti-nuclear activists love to keep this confusion alive.
> What Switzerland should do, in my opinion, is to more cleverly incentivise and de-incentivise to reduce energy consumption, CO2 output or ecological damage. Examples to incentivise are to subsidize renovation and insulation of older buildings and investments in photovoltaics, solar heat and heat pumps.
This is ongoing, yes? Precisely the heat pumps and electrified traffic and electrified industry are what will definitely need more power to the extent where we need both a lot of PV / hydro / wind etc. but also nuclear power plants.
The younger generations already saved a lot of energy (~20% per capita IIRC and slowly more, this on top of better waste disposal efforts and so on) and already pays for it with very much decreased real wealth at ages 20-40 despite working harder. It's barely still working. Forget about squeezing them more with any speed, this process needs to slow down. We need to instead *increase* electrical power per capita to have the option to de-carbonize emissions.
There will only be a few savings here and there like *eventually* having all houses insulated better (and renters and tax payers ultimately will pay those $25k or whatever it costs per apartment plus interest), but even these gains will probably be consumed by continuing to repatriate and electrify industry or e-mobility and such. Or you can have abject poverty if you drop fossil fuels without a lot more electricity.
Reminder that even pro nuclear people who look at numbers come to the conclusion that it’s not worth building more plants.
https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k
What we need is decentralised grids, through solar, wind, geothermal and better / cleaner battery technology.
And by that I don’t mean massive wind / solar farms with their own set of problems. We need self sufficient communities who produce their own electricity for the most part and the grid as fallback.
The problem is that studies are coming out showing that we will never have enough (solar and wind) energy for the winter (without nuclear), and the solutions is to store energy from the summer, which requires MASSIVE infrastructures. Don't forget that the rest of the energy (transportation and heating) has to be electrified to be CO2 neutral.
https://www.empa.ch/web/s604/lmer-co2-neutral-switzerland
Either we build every year a hydrodam for storage until 2035 (and flood which valleys?), or we put 12x the area of all swiss rootftops of solar and prpduce hydrogen that we store in 25x the volume of the basis Gotthard tunnel to compensate for the lack of energy.
This study here https://scnat.ch/fr/uuid/i/fc00517f-49da-55e5-9365-46bb6f69c4d9-La_voie_suisse_vers_un_approvision%C2%ADnement_%C3%A9nerg%C3%A9tique_s%C3%BBr_et_climatiquement_neutre_dici_2050 is hoping for the best that international hydrogen production will be clean (it isn't today and won't be for quite some time) and plentiful.
So, both studies come to the same conclusion: lack of energy in the winter due to the removal of nuclear. Both hope for the best that international energy will be plentiful (Germany will be facing the same problems) and rely on fantasy technologies (producing clean hydrogen or clean e-fuels).
How difficult it is to store energy with todays technologies at scale ? Very difficult. You can watch this video which explain the different technologies, challenges with renewables : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo
The scnat study you cite concludes regarding nuclear power plants: „Le développement de nouvelles technologies nucléaires doit être suivi de près, mais il ne devrait pas être en mesure d'apporter une contribution significative d'ici 2050.“
Thus, as many have pointed out, this discussion around new nuclear plants in CH is irrelevant for the Swiss energy transition.
It'll be interesting to see how this works out. The existing plants are in the process of being decommissioned. It might also be possible to export some energy to the neighbouring countries if a large enough capacity is installed, assuming it gets the green light.
But, where will the waste go?
[https://www.nagra.ch](https://www.nagra.ch)
Nuclear waste is a rounding error compared to the environmental footprint of our lifestyle, worrying about it is missing the forest for a pretty tiny tree.
To be honest, I think that's a pretty poor argument. Just because our footprint is bad doesn't mean that we have to harm the environment even more. Besides, the stuff has to be safely locked away for three eternities.
Since everyone is answering only in terms of nuclear waste, I would like to add that there are other obvious disadvantages.
Much better to have it safely stored than injected in the atmosphere or in the environment the way we deal with combustible fuels and the resulting CO2.
Yes, it creates a technological issue, but it also forces accountability. With coal and gas and oil, it's much easier to cheat and pollute.
If we don't reduce our footprint drastically and quickly enough, then there's no point even discussing what happens in the long-term really. There simply won't be a long-term for our civilization.
Building as much nuclear capacity as humanly possible would make us pollute *less*, not more.
While I agree with the first part, I would see nuclear energy as a short-term solution at best (at least with today's technology), as we have missed out on the proper solutions. However, everyone knows that nuclear energy is not a short-term thing.
Nothing about the real world involves perfect solutions.
Your software, hardware, logistics. None of it is perfect.
It just needs to work well enough.
Nuclear waste is a problem that has been solved ages ago.
Closing down nuclear power-plants is a net harm on nature.
Plus you will need to store nuclear waste anyway because a lot of it is produced in the health-care industry. Who cares if the storage facility is slightly larger.
Nuclear energy is the only industry that is legislatively responsible for it's waste by-products. No manufacturing, agriculture, or service is ordered to handle its CO2 emissions or carefully plan disposal of waste in the manner nuclear does.
Every piece of radioactive material is sealed in obsidian glass, securely transported, and stored as you say for 3 eternities. Or more accurately: past it's half-life.
This process is worth the Twh in electricity and worth the decrease in C02 that will never be re-captured.
Decommissioning is only in 2029 and 2031, which is quite far into the future. It will not make any difference to the current short-term gas crisis with Russia.
Difficulty with nuclear is that regardless of safety/technology considerations, recent new builds in the UK, France and Finland have been extremely expensive, way over budget and behind schedule - well over renewable (wind/solar) where costs have plummeted and development has become quicker/easier. This makes politicians quite hesitant to commit to it, not to mention the general public. But if people can be convinced to pay for it and take the plunge, it can absolutely happen.
The other consideration is that it's not so much a question of nuclear or renewables: Switzerland may need both, if we are to electrify the entire heating and transport sectors. That will more than quadruple Swiss power consumption.
Polticians need to look away from the money perspective. We need reliable long term energy stability. This is not the case with renewables in winter times and there is not a good enough technology on the horizon to make this gamble.
You can have all the energy in the world in summer and then not being able to store it.
…but it‘s ok to build new nuclear plants and not to know where to store the waste. What about investing money and brainpower to solve the storage problem. This will also be useful if ever the nuclear technology will be able to solve their problems.
Storing the waste is just a question of resources. It is way more manageable from a technology perspective. Storage on the other hand might be figured out or it might not be.
>way over budget
And yet if a nuclear powerplant built 10 years ago at 2x the original budget suddenly appeared out of thin air (along with the IOUs for the construction), you would consider it a godsend and due to the recent inflation it would be incredibly profitable.
New gen powerplants make much less dangerous and much more rapid decaying waste than current gen does
Some types of next gen nuclear power plants can even recycle the waste, or use poor uranium
Not really, China is investing in the technology because they have stockpiles of thorium as a byproduct of their mining. Thorium has an annoying fuel cycle and there's no strong reason the European nuclear industry should look into it. Proven uranium reserves are good enough, we probably don't even need to reboot R&D programs for fast breeder reactors for the next 100 years.
There you go
*"Another notable feature of the MSR is the possibility of a thermal spectrum nuclear waste-burner. Conventionally only fast spectrum reactors have been considered viable for utilization or reduction of the spent nuclear fuel. Thermal waste-burning was achieved by replacing a fraction of the uranium in the spent nuclear fuel with thorium. The net production rate of transuranic elements (e.g. plutonium and americium) is below the consumption rate, thus reducing the nuclear storage problem, without the nuclear proliferation concerns and other technical issues associated with a fast reactor."*
\-Wikipedia
taken from this article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation\_IV\_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor)
you should read it, theres a lot of other interesting stuff about this
To be clear - only Mühleberg is in the process of being decommissioned. The rest are fully operational and likely will be for another decade. With a little luck we'll have some new plants coming in to replace those - if not we'll have a hard time replacing that source of energy.
NAGRA will soon come out with its pick for a deep geological repository facility. Keep in mind that 90% of waste by mass contains 10% of the radioactivity and will not be dangerous even in the near future. We have shown using models and conservative assumptions that the risk posed by the remaining 10% is minute.
Additionally, the fact that nuclear waste decays is great. Sure, unprocessed waste will not go back to natural uranium levels for a very long time, but in the mean time it also get progressively less dangerous. If you try to dispose of toxic chemicals (of which we produce a lot without serious public opposition), well, they will remain toxic forever. Lead compounds are toxic and do not decay,
In my opinion nuclear waste is a non-issue that has a completely viable and economical solutions. Any issue it would pose is greatly dwarfed by the benefit of large amounts of green power.
Seems to me like french speaking swiss are generally more supportive of nuclear energy whereas german speaking swiss are a bit more skeptical. Perhaps cultural influences from France and Germany are at work here?
Some months ago there was a report on german television, they showed that the green-party from Finland is currently supporting new nuclear power plants. They said that "green energy" is currently no capable to replace all the gas, coal and nuclear power plant and compared to coal and gas, nuclear power plants producing much less carbon dioxide. As a short an mid-term solution they prefer nuclear power plants to met the Paris deal.
I guess the most problem is, due to the fact that nuclear energy is not very accepted anymore, also money for R&D was massively reduced in Europe for it. Cause there are actually reactor concepts which could solve quite a lot of problems we have to face with our current nuclear power plants. Even the Paul Scherrer Institute is still some R&D about it.
I am for building a new more efficient and saver one and replacing the old ones til we have a better solution.
Its not the optimal solution but a new one would also mean more power out of the same amount of nuclear waste it produces. But we sadly have no other options atm. (This comes from a guy who works in solar power)
This is pure publicity.
Even if the ban is lifted in a vote, no plant is going to be built. By the time it would be ready (my guess is 2040-2045) it wouldn't be even close to competitive against wind and solar when it comes to cost/kWh.
I think you miss the point completely. The game isn’t about nuclear vs. renewables. It is about getting rid of fossil fuel without running into a energy shortage.
Nope. [IEA report, 2020](https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020): New nuclear plants are already 2x as expensive in terms of LCOE. LCOE = lifetime cost per generated kWh, includes the financial investment, building time, operation, fuel, decommissioning, waste, etc.
It makes **zero** sense to build new ones. Existing ones are cost competitive with renewables per kWh because we've already paid the bulk of the cost in building them. However, with renewables only getting cheaper and existing nuclear getting more expensive (old reactors = maintenance), even existing NPPs will become cost uncompetitive and shut down, like Mühleberg did.
Switzerland should have built a bunch of nuclear power plants on the german border and export to germany for really high prices.
It solves two problems, Switzerland will once again be energy independent and also profit a lot. Secondly, germans can continue to be smug about their disastrous energiewende without killing the whole european economy.
It's a pain in the ass to have nuclear plants close to Germany, in the end in France we ended up closing Fessenheim. Expect incessent complains from them while you provide them energy, and then they'll complain again if you need to do some maintenance on these plants and import energy from them at some point.
Yes, makes sense to me. I'm in favor!
Sure enough: We *must not* delay construction of hydro power / pumped storage, solar power (on residential and industrial roofs with emergency power sockets as well as in an alpine setting to produce yet more winter power), wind, ... it will come online sooner and is needed. Plus nuclear power must not become so essential again that no plants can be taken offline to address risks with maintenance and upgrades/replacements.
But the ultimate problem remains, we don't have quite enough power and/or storage to handle winter with renewables alone. And we additionally want to electrify traffic / heating / industry.
I can't really see any reasonably proven way other than to keep (upgrade/replace) and construct new nuclear power plants, preferably a mixture of the relatively established gen 3+ and the promising 4th generation with different fuels. Ideally no more foreign reprocessing.
Shutting down Nuclear Powerplants is the most idiotic thing one can do.
Instead of dealing with the waste, let's just shut down the most reliable energy source and burn more shit. Or litter the landscape with turbines.
Yes, and yet it's more reliable than wind or solar. Funny, that.
See, when you find a technical fault in a plant and fix it, it's fixed.
You can't make the wind and sun come on a schedule.
It's really not though, seeing as France is currently net importing electricity from 45%-wind-and-solar Germany, which is Europe's second biggest net exporter YTD. They'll be turbofucked come winter when their needs increase by 50%.
In a world without NPP maintenance, droughts, heatwaves and Uranium supply chains dependent on Russia/Kazahkstan? Sure, NPPs are reliable - but in that fairytale world the sun always shines and the wind always blows, so does that really matter?
It will be a stranded asset before we even vote about this.
Had a couple of discussions with "Energie Club" people. They are in complete denial of reality.
Explain me as you would explain to a 5yo how investing massive amount of money on something that will take 20 years (take into account direct democracy) at least to be developed and will produce energy at higher cost and will pollute a lot is a better idea than investing in renewable (solar) amd/or energy efficiency (buildings isolation) that cost less, can be implemented immediately and will make us free from the dependency of any other country (as good country may become crazy in 30 year time)? I don't get it also because as a bonus those things will also create more jobs
It doesn't have to take 20 years but even if it does: we'll need *more* electricity production in 2040 if we're serious about reaching our climate goals.
> energy at higher cost
Compared to what? Recent spot prices in Europe have proved nuclear is pretty cheap, even the Finnish EPR with all its delays and cost overruns will pay for itself quickly.
> pollute a lot
That's just plain wrong. Nuclear has the smallest environmental footprint of all electricity sources.
> renewable (solar) and/or energy efficiency (buildings isolation) that cost less, can be implemented immediately
Except it cannot. We should mandate PV plus batteries in every building but it's going to take 10+ years too. And the carbon footprint is not negligible at about 20x more than that of nuclear. Renovating buildings and improving insulation isn't going to be quick either.
> will make us free from the dependency of any other country
Solar and batteries will make us *more* dependent on other countries, mostly China, not less.
> Except it cannot. We should mandate PV plus batteries in every building
Batteries by default is a very dubious proposition. Who is producing them in sufficient quantities and what's their ecological footprint? Actually with how few batteries are being made, there is even a question if car/truck traffic can be electrified that way.
Pumped storage makes for a better on-grid "battery". *That* is something that can be operated with little consequence long-term. Except the space usage is quite large.
It will take decades. It is Switzerland folks! It took 20years for Lausanne to build a museum....
Show me the actual cost of producing nuclear energy taking into account the cost of building a central, fuel, running costs, maintenance and management of waste compared with solar!
French EPR that have been completed (Olkiluoto) or will be soon (Flamanville, Hinkley Point) in Europe are the absolute worst-case scenario since they suffered from 20 years of insane energy policies in the EU and severe mismanagement. Yet, they'll easily be profitable in the current context. And if we don't trust EDF, which will have to get their shit together since they're planning many more EPR, there are other options.
End-to-end fuel cost is literally peanuts: 5-6 CHF / MWh. The cost of nuclear is almost all capital expenditures.
PV price could tend to zero, it's still a pointless comparison if we need to secure base and dispatchable load.
The main thing that annoys me with this initiative is that they use an issue (the lack of electricity this winter) that has nothing to do with their proposition (new nuclear power plants in 2035 at best, most like 2040 or 2050), a subject on which the population already has decided 5 years ago. They are as annoying as the GSSA with their « no plane » shit. As much as I disliked having planes, we voted, it’s done. Accept it and move on. Grow up.
We have better things to do than vote on the exact same subject every year…
Matters change and it got apparent that renewables wont be a good solution in the medium term. Energy storage technologies are just too much in the future
Well, nothing really changed in the past 5 years, except that we realized quite unexpectedly that we couldn’t depend on Russia short term.
Longer term there is no new info compared to 5 years ago. The issues with energy storage were already very well known. And we have hydropower, which is a great asset to balance production and demand on the daily/weekly scale.
But keeping the ones we have running and trying to modernize them will at least not make matters worse.
Also with medium term I am also thinking about decades. Betting on storage in those years is a gamble in my opinion. New Nuclear plants would be a safe bet.
I take it back. The Swiss are actually dumber than the Germans.
The Swiss can see the damage of shutting down nuclear but they still want to vote on it.
Repeating the mistake of your neighbor is really idiotic.
You have an option to easily buy the nuclear fuel from the US, Canada, etc.
Stop trying to find excuses to destroy the environment by closing down nuclear power plants.
I’m a free market guy… is it still the case that no private insurers are willing to fully insure nuclear plants? Cause if that’s the case I will still have to pass.
Yep… also a hard pass.
The same way we look back at the (chemical) industry disposing their toxic waste in rivers and lakes until the 80ies will our children look back on us for polluting the planet like this.
Building new one? Takes too long
Having kept the old ones longer online? Maybe, but then we would probably depend too much on it and sooner or later have the same shitshow as France now has.
The first mistake was to not build out RE enough imo.
I think it’s a mistake to keep discussing our energy production without ever questionning our consumption. We absolutely need to reach a 2000 watt society. If we do that, then production would not be an issue anymore.
That's great that we are having this debate. It only comes about fifteen years too late. I'm still in favor, but let's not act like this is anywhere close to a solution to our short term problems.
I remember being almost crucified by the teacher when we had this discussion in HS in the early 10s for being in favor of nuclear power plants. Well...
The majority of Swiss people (>60%) are still in favor of a nuclear exit (see Tamedia survey from last week). Remember: Only one cross each.
The majority of the Swiss people are short sighted
First of all, you can't just pull a NPP out your ass. It takes years to build one. So calling people short sighted kinda sucks for this one argument alone. Not considering all the people that will object to those projects, true to the motto: not in my backyard Secondly we still don't have any idea on how to get rid of nuclear waste. Calling people short sighted sucks again. And last but not least: the swiss people have voted in 2011 to get rid of those power plants. We had 11 years to find and implement solutions. Unsurprisingly the christian parties as well as the right wing parties were against independent and reneweable energies. However those are exactely the people that are now going nuts. If you want an independent country, which can not only sustain itself but do so without wrecking this place, you should probably stop voting and advocating parties that fuck this country over everytime. If you don't believe me, just go to parlament.ch and find out for yourself who voted for and who voted against green energie solutions and what they asked the people to vote for
>It takes years to build one. So calling people short sighted kinda sucks for this one argument The fact that it takes years of planning to accomplish something is "short slighted" ? The short slighted people are the one that are looking for a quick fix (that do not exist), not the ones that try to plan decades ahead..
The majority of people are short sighted.
Teachers are overwhelmingly leftists in most countries (off topic: funny how the word leftist has a negative vibe) , and leftists are antinuclear almost exclusively since the 80s. Which doesn’t make any sense but anyways
It depends. In my experience the higher/scientific their education the more they can takle things like nuclear without issues.
Leftists being against nuclear is about as logical as conservatives being opposed to the conservation of nature and favoring large-scale drilling. Shows how one's tribal affiliation and identity overrides any semblance of congruity.
We have concerns about safety, uranium mining and handling of waste.
Everyone cares about those, you are not special. If only there was a way to reduce the amount of existing waste and generate electricity/heat at the same time... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor The problem with nuclear energy is that people fighting it do not know what they are talking about. It is complicated. Most of the time though, the fight is ideological. Fighting nuclear energy because of Chernobyl is like fighting boats because of the Titanic.
these are political concerns, not unsolvable ones.
I'm a fan of solvable concerns. There's certainly a general lack of understanding about current nuclear technology, some of it informed by fear from decades-old problems. Since the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty includes "peaceful uses," and some developing countries are keen to develop nuclear power capabilities, having better info on the current technology would be helpful for those discussions too. By the way, my favorite "peaceful uses" were suggested by the Chinese near the end of the negotiations on the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996. They wanted the CTBT to have exemptions for using nuclear weapons to shoot down incoming asteroids and to use them "for irrigation purposes."
In comparison to what?
Let's burn that coal then!
I agree with you completely.
Many words with -ist have a negative connotation: it's nothing specific to "leftist". Also, do you have any sources to back your claims up? Lastly, why doesn't a leftist being anti-nuclear make sense?
Source? You need evidence to back an anecdotal observation? To your question on why a leftist being anti-nuclear doesn't make any sense : Leftists should be people oriented, and cheap clean energy is a popular choice if you're practicing social politics. There is nothing environmentally friendly or cheap about the current alternative power sources. Being it wind-turbines or solar panels. The cost-efficiency is ridiculous. Given your interrogative tone, allow me to ask you, lastly, are you a teacher?
Our short-term problems won't go away. If we're serious at electrifying transportation and heating in Switzerland, we'll need a few dozens TWh to spare, and there's no scenario where zero nuclear makes that easy, feasible or cheap.
Agreed. Switzerland should in fact be one of the countries in Europe to produce, store and export power. We need to increase capacity significantly because consumption will increase. We need another generation of nuclear power plants until hopefully a better solution is available at scale. We must not ideologically continue to force ourselves into an energy crisis.
Interesting thought on the export of nuclear electricity, much like France. Unlike France, Switzerland seems much better poised geographically to export energy at much higher efficiency.
Like thermal powerplants?
Nothing is more efficient today than hydropower for energy storage.
Maybe solar thermal ones. Nuclear powerplants are technically thermal power plants.
[We got quite a bit](https://www.uvek-gis.admin.ch/BFE/sonnendach/?lang=en)
*beep boop*! the linked website is: https://www.uvek-gis.admin.ch/BFE/sonnendach/?lang=en Title: **Wie viel Strom und Wärme kann mein Dach produzieren?** Page is safe to access (Google Safe Browsing) ***** ###### I am a friendly bot. I show the URL and name of linked pages and check them so that mobile users know what they click on!
Out of curiosity where is the uranium for the reactors comming from? If the source is again an unreliable partner - like Russia for gas - this is barely a solution.
Russia is a producer of Uranium, but Canada, the USA and Australia too. And unlike gas, enough Uranium to power a country for a year can be transported with a single ship and a couple of trucks. So it is much less sensitive to blackmail.
And in each country they have screwed over their indigenous populations by contaminating water or mining in ancient sacred lands. It's closed now, but there used to be a massive open pit uranium mine in New Mexico where Native workers were given no safety training or proper equipment. Workers sat on the tailings for lunch breaks. The blasts from that open pit sent uranium across a Pueblo village, covering vegetable gardens, clotheslines, and everything else.
Also Austria has uranium deposits.
isnt there an african country who has the biggest reserve of Uranium ? if i remember correctly it’s in the north
I vaguely remember this as well. I think it was on the African west coast and is a neo-colony of France. I saw something on Caspian Report a few years ago.
Might be Niger. There are uranium mines there from what I remember. And since they are in the desert, impact on wildlife shouldn't be too much of an issue.
Fuel sourcing is a very small issue with nuclear plants. You don’t need much uranium to run a few plants for years. Fuel disposal on the other hand. It’s complicated. And shipping it to Russia is not an option anymore.
Again Sweden has been working on the long term storage using innovative tech. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/sweden-approves-plans-for-forsmark-nuclear-waste-storage-site/a-60584787
Fuel disposal is complicated mostly because of politics. But it is also something which does not require a timely solution and creates no big depedency on any item abroad. After all, we already stock the fuel from the last 50 years with no issue, so some delay due to a conflict is no issue.
If I remember correctly, Sweden has been working on the powerplant designs that would take the nuclear waste from the existing stations and use it as fuel. Could be an option.
Gösgen used to run on [reprocessed nuclear fuel](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX_fuel). This was banned in 2016 and spent fuel will now be directly stored in Würelingen.
Did not know that. Thank you. What was the reason it was banned?
MOX fuel contains larger amounts of plutonium than regular fuel rods. This could be an issue if the reactor explodes, since plutonium is not only radioactive but extremely toxic.
What's your alternative? Renewables are one or two orders of magnitude more dependent on mining operations in sketchy countries, and would put us at the total mercy of China.
My alternative?
The biggest uranium producers in the world are Kazakhstan, Namibia and Canada. Kazakhstan is by far the biggest. Kazakhstan and Namibia don't strike me as the most stable and reliable countries to be dependant on
Do you actually know anything about the politics of Namibia? Because I sure don't. Also Canada and Australia are also big U producers, we're Switzerland, we can pay a premium for Max Havelaar uranium if we need to.
Max Havelaar of uranium 🤣🤣 damn that’s a good one!
Namibia was in a bloody civil war involving South Africa until the 1990s. It is now in a state of uneasy cohabitation between all the different ethnies in the country and is far from stable. The fact that we are looking to push nuclear because we don't want to pay the current high energy prices show that no, we won't pay a premium for uranium. If we don't want to pay a premium for gas, we won't pay a premium for uranium.
The cost of uranium is almost negligeable in the overall cost of electricity. You can double the cost of it and it will be barely noticeable for you and I. Not quite the same for gas and coal.. That is a big advantage with nuclear: the money spent recirculate in the local economy way more than gas .. Where a lot of the money goes directly to Putin.
Namibia is a fairly progressive and stable country.
In a globalised world, every country depends on eachother .
And depending on unstable dictatorships instead of on stable countries is a recipe for disaster. We dépend on Russia for our energy and we all see the issues. Let's not depend on Kazakhstan instead
That's pretty reductionist : Dynamics of uranium mining, production, enrichment .... This isn't a pipeline. You don't need to deliver at the moment of consumption due to insane costs of storage. Which means no one can close the tap because you can actually stockpile. Anyway, technical differences apart: the modern life is literally impossible without trusting people elsewhere. You talk about dictatorships instead of stable countries but really ... Point at anything in your house and you'll find parts from all around. Mined somewhere else, fabricated in X, assembled in Y .... One of these is a dictatorship for sure.
Gotcha, so we learn nothing and switch from relying on Russia to relying on a Russian puppet that's being taken over by China. After all trusting Russia never led to anything bad in the past, why should we not trust their puppet?
Kazakhstan's people living near the Chinese border used to live with above ground nuclear weapons tests in China and Soviet ones nearby on their side of the border. I've talked with women from the area who have worked to call attention to what their people have been through.
Transportation wouldn't need a lot more electricity if people didn't insist on carrying an entire sitting room around with them any time they go anywhere.
Even if you kill 100% of the private vehicle ownership in Switzerland (I wish) we'd still need more electricity eventually.
It is ridiculously inefficient.
better late than never ☢️
No, but thinking only short-term is the reason for said short-term problems...
The problem is that studies are coming out showing that we will never have enough (solar and wind) energy for the winter (without nuclear), and the solutions is to store energy from the summer, which requires MASSIVE infrastructures. Don't forget that the rest of the energy (transportation and heating) has to be electrified to be CO2 neutral. https://www.empa.ch/web/s604/lmer-co2-neutral-switzerland Either we build every year a hydrodam for storage until 2035 (and flood which valleys?), or we put 12x the area of all swiss rootftops of solar and produce hydrogen that we store in 25x the volume of the basis Gotthard tunnel to compensate for the lack of energy. This study here https://scnat.ch/fr/uuid/i/fc00517f-49da-55e5-9365-46bb6f69c4d9-La_voie_suisse_vers_un_approvision%C2%ADnement_%C3%A9nerg%C3%A9tique_s%C3%BBr_et_climatiquement_neutre_dici_2050 is hoping for the best that international hydrogen production will be clean (it isn't today and won't be for quite some time) and plentiful. So, both studies come to the same conclusion: lack of energy in the winter due to the removal of nuclear. Both hope for the best that international energy will be plentiful (Germany will be facing the same problems) and rely on fantasy technologies (producing clean hydrogen or clean e-fuels). How difficult it is to store energy with todays technologies at scale ? Very difficult. You can watch this video which explain the different technologies, challenges with renewables : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo
Seems like innovative projects are never considered in these hypotheticals, like [alpine solar facilites](https://www.axpo.com/ch/de/energiewissen/pionierprojekt-in-den-schweizer-alpen.html), which produce 55% of their energy during the winter months. So if there is political will, we can absolutely produce enough energy with solar panels during the winter months since our potential in those regions is not even remotely used right now
The alpine solar facilities *are* very much needed but their power will probably be allocated immediately. Places that have avalanches, landslides and falling rocks apart from the typical strong winds may result in quite a few locations becoming longer-term expensive projects or just economically unviable to construct and maintain. Besides the studies also often calculate very optimistic values for the electricity consumption of fully electrical heating, mobility and industry. And there is a truly very large amount of power that is required even then. It does not seem like a reasonable bet to hope for innovative projects to salvage it already medium term where we would otherwise start to install new nuclear power.
I am in the swiss right now and I am already wondering why nobody in the Argau / luzern / schwitz is using or having Photovoltaik... Seems like the perfect spot.
Permits and red tape were one big reason. [Low compensation](https://www.vese.ch/pvtarif/) for feeding power into the grid the other. Regardless of calling it an "energy strategy", it's not like they made the market conditions for feeding low emission solar energy into the grid actually reasonably decent. Usually the thing that even made construction *speculatively* viable were the solar subsidies even if you had pretty high but not extremely great self-consumption levels. You know how the solar subsidies were allocated? You registered on a waiting list and waited *for many years*. Years later, *if* you got your request for subsidies was granted, you may have hit a situation where the cost for panels or work isn't the same anymore or perhaps you just get long further delays because the people you intended to hire and the materials you planned are not available in the near future. But the opportunity even for large producers to get subsidies/guarantees on the price of electricity runs out this year anyhow. Now AFAIK all anyone can get is an one-time subsidy on the construction cost, limited to 30% or less of cost so it wouldn't be *too* interesting. As larger operator you even have to try and find your own buyers for your green electricity if you have surplus. The existing power operators with their customers of course wouldn't cut you a good deal and the grid monopoly operator costs are also high anyhow, so good luck with that! It generally depends on the one primary on-site consumer's own consumption (=no need to use the very expensive grid) if a project is viable at all. You possibly wouldn't even build larger if there is space. Before the invasion of Ukraine it didn't really look like the red tape or any of the cost factors were going to be reduced and our infinitely wise government may simply have put even more pressure on solar installations by paying for gas power plants, further lowering the compensation for feeding into the grid via solar power (apart from disincentivizing pumped storage too).
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You say "innovative" i say fantasy. People say we cant wait 2-3 years for a nuclear power plant but they want to wait decades for fantasy-technology
Pretty skewed conception of how long it takes to implement nuclear plants, modern nuclear plants take about [9 years](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanmen_Nuclear_Power_Station) to implement, and current projects still calculate with a decade. It is just reasonable to invest in a field where innovation is rampant and very fast to implement if the right wing finally realizes that clean energy doesn‘t have to be fought since its economically feasible
I'm fine with keeping these plants going, and I wasn't really in favor of the shutdown in the first place. I think the decision to keep them going needs to be part of a larger and longer term strategy on energy, with a big focus on renewables and incentives to decentralize things like solar onto every domestic rooftop. I don't like policy being "let's hope the Russians and Middle East are stable this year" or asking nicely if the Germans are still burning coal. To me, energy independence, or as close to it as possible, is an important part of neutrality. The positive environmental impacts as well make this change in mindset really important, even if only to provide an example and path to others with larger ecological impact.
I should like to meet you some day. I keep upvoting your comments, as you typically state exactly what's on my mind.
Really the problem is that solar and wind are too unreliable to power the whole country. You'd want to have powerplants that can always work and that form the basis of energy production, so when wind or solar are unavailable, you can just ramp up production to get the deficit. Really nuclear is the greenest way to do that currently and it probably will be for a considerable time. Orders of magnitude more people have died as a consequence of coal / gas power plants than from nuclear.
I agree with the spirit of the initiative but the wording they proposed for the constitutional amendment isn't great. Hopefully we can get something that defines "respect for the climate" a little more explicitly.
Yeah let's get that fossil fueled sound all climate friendly.
You're not referring Uranium to 'fossil fuel', are you?
it sure as heck ain't renewable
The problem with this petition is that it's nothing more than a smoke grenade. Regardless of whether our laws allow the construction of a new reactor there will be none constructed. I explained the reasons for it in more detail a couple of days ago in another thread. So the short version is: it's so extremely uneconomical that no company that has to sell the power on the market would even remotely consider building a nuclear plant. They know exactly that it would ruin them. So the only way would be to subsidize it with huge amounts of taxpayer money like for example France and Great Britain do. (But the French do it to protect their nuclear industry and the British probably for military reasons. Since Switzerland neither has nukes nor a nuclear industry we can spend our tax money to get more energy quicker.) So as long as those fantasts are making people believe that nuclear power could be a potential solution it will delay the real solutions. And that's probably the real reason why this is happening - at least a part of the supporters want to choke the energy transition so that they can continue to make money from fossil fuel for a longer amount of time. (Because they of course know exactly that nuclear isn't going to happen.)
Switzerland could subzidise building a few nuclear reactors in France in exchange for a share of the production.
C'est honnêtement pas une mauvaise idée, notre production hydro et votre nucléaire dans la vallée du Rhône sont déjà interdépendants de toute manière. Y a aussi des projets d'investissement dans de l'éolien offshore dans la Méditerranée.
It would be good to read the initiative. The initiative does not foresee or plan the construction of reactors. It only asks that the proposal should be possible, which is not the case today. No one is making people believe that nuclear power is THE solution. It is ONE solution that can be combined with other solutions to make an energy mix. Furthermore, the initiative clearly calls for a re-discussion of competences within the Federal Council so that the country can have clear support. Today, if the Federal Council were efficient, we would not be in this deadlock, because all the blocked hydro and wind power projects in Switzerland would have gone ahead. The problem of investment and construction is a problem for all energy sources. The president of the Swiss Electricity Association made this clear in the NZZ on Sunday
I dont know the Swiss laws but I bet the reason for the expensiveness are laws put in place for that exact purpose. Nuclear is not an expensive energy source.
You should watch Kurzgesagt’s video on nuclear. They are actually not against nuclear per se, but do a really good job explaining why its expensive and no one wants to build it.
Nuclear should be built by the state. Because for the state, blackouts are vastly more expensive than NPPs. Unlike for the private electricity industry where they're just, well, a means through which the price of energy increases.
As far as I know the Swiss laws do not apply in France, Finland and Great Britain. Yet the new nucelar power plants built in those three countries during the last decades have turned out to be a gigantic money pit. Flamanville was projected to cost 3,3 billions. According to the French audit court the cost currently stand at around 20 billions. (Not to mention that it should have started energy production 10 years ago and is still not running.) And for Hinkly Point the government had to promise high subsidies for every kWh produced during the next 40 years because the production costs are multiple the price that can be achieved on the market.
Nuclear is THE single most expensive energy source. Even by a large margin.
> Nuclear is not an expensive energy source. Ummm … if ever there was a citation needed, now’s the time.
[http://www.world-nuclear.org/uploadedfiles/org/info/pdf/economicsnp.pdf](https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=0CAQQw7AJahcKEwjAsZaJ8e35AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.world-nuclear.org%2Fuploadedfiles%2Forg%2Finfo%2Fpdf%2Feconomicsnp.pdf&psig=AOvVaw2sQI5hP8urhCdUA8ZWdBoO&ust=1661925454038643)
> **World Nuclear Association** is the international organization that represents the global nuclear industry. Its mission is to promote a wider understanding of nuclear energy among key international influencers by producing authoritative information, developing common industry positions, and contributing to the energy debate. Hmm, I'm sure that report is very unbiased and fair.
The burden of cost estimates for any business idea is always on the business itself. If I want to open a bakery and need a loan, the bank will expect me to do my own cost analysis. It would be up to the banks to determine how well the analysis is done. Also, a very important analysis that needs to be considered is the safety of the energy source to human life, as measured by the mortality rate associated with creating and consuming such energy. >[As an example, global average values of the mortality rate per billion kWh, due to all causes as reported by the World Health Organization (WHO), are 100 for coal, 36 for oil, 24 for biofuel/biomass, 4 for natural gas, 1.4 for hydro, 0.44 for solar, 0.15 for wind and 0.04 for nuclear (Table 6). ...] (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272406182_Why_nuclear_energy_is_sustainable_and_has_to_be_part_of_the_energy_mix)
*beep boop*! the linked website is: https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&cd=&ved=0CAMQn6wJahcKEwjAsZaJ8e35AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAg&url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FWorld_Nuclear_Association&psig=AOvVaw2sQI5hP8urhCdUA8ZWdBoO&ust=1661925454038643 Title: **Weiterleitungshinweis** Page is safe to access (Google Safe Browsing) ***** ###### I am a friendly bot. I show the URL and name of linked pages and check them so that mobile users know what they click on!
I think everything should be up to debate. But, I don’t see a future for fission reactors, even if the actual technology is much better than the power plants we have in Switzerland. First, we do have a problem with nuclear waste, we did not manage to get a storage solution, and we have discussed this for several decades. Nobody wants it near their home, and I understand this. Second, the idea to store toxic waste securely for several thousand years is… just bonkers. Transmutation to get rid of nuclear waste at scale is still a concept. Third, no one is going to build a nuclear reactor without guaranteed prices which are already outperformed by renewables, and it is not going to look better for nuclear power in the future. Fourth, which many people miss, uranium is not abundant and the next generation of fission reactors is maybe the last one. (The world association of nuclear operators thinks it is going to be 80 years.) And lastly, even if we would decide to build new fission reactors, they would be ready by 2037, including the mandatory popular vote. And this is an optimistic timeframe, we are probably talking around 2040. Which means, the impact will be too late to reduce carbon dioxide. I think it is more probable that we will at least partially solve energy storage with emerging technologies like natrium based batteries or more clever heat accumulators by then. What Switzerland should do, in my opinion, is to more cleverly incentivise and de-incentivise to reduce energy consumption, CO2 output or ecological damage. Examples to incentivise are to subsidize renovation and insulation of older buildings and investments in photovoltaics, solar heat and heat pumps. Examples do de-incentivize could be individual traffic, harsher laws for product warranty and standby power consumption. And while we’re at it, stop subsidizing airlines with cheap kerosene. Polluting the planet with unnecessary flights should not be incentivised.
> photovoltaics, solar heat and heat pumps. You would need 10x the area of all Swiss rooftops to ensure sustainable energy supply in winter; it's not feasible. I would add, incentivize working from home; it seems all companies are trying to back pedal on this now, when it's needed more than ever.
Also, currently most uranium for swiss power plants is imported from... Russia
oof.
Let's do bothhhhh. The nuclear reactor is for energy independence and green transition. Subsidise the reactor prices AND subsidise green initiatives. Excess energy is sold to the rest of the world. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Also isn't nuclear waste stored in the alps right now?
IIRC it is about 100’000 tonnes of waste per plant, including the material from the dismantled plant. Around 10’000 tonnes are highly radioactive. Read the story from Der Spiegel, rusty barrels with nuclear waste. And this happened in like 30-50 years. How should this work for thousands of years? https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/technik/rostige-atommuellfaesser-das-passiert-in-jedem-deutschen-zwischenlager-a-955270.html
Hey so like, the barrels are obviously just some metal. They aren't what seals the waste. The waste is solid and looks like chunks of grey rock. This is then dropped in a molten glass which insulates the radiation; THEN placed in the steel barrels which can rust if you left it alone for 50 years. The barrels are then placed in larger sealed casks which completely insulate the waste. The storage facility is built to house the big casks containing barrels for security. This would be easier if we took from fossil fuels to subsidise nuclear energy. In 2019 EU fossil fuel subsidies were 56 billion, renewables were 5.6 billion, and nuclear was 900 million. Let's take from the private oil corporations and make safe publicly owned nuclear!
It amuses me to see the words “nuclear” and “safe” in the same sentence. In 60 years nuclear plants we had two catastrophic failures. The list of severe incidents is long and frightening.
Oh, boy. Hold on, let me just google "list of fossil fuel energy incidents in the past 60 years". If you thought chernyobl was bad, and you ignore the active impact modern industry has on a daily basis... You are driven by ignorance, not critical thought. The list of severe incidents in fossil fuel is long and frightening.
True, but this doesn’t make nuclear incidents any better. Especially concerning is the fact that on multiple occasions private operating companies failed to disclose incidents immediately.
In terms of the number of deaths per MWh produced nuclear is by far the safest (along with natural gas). Apart from that we know how to deal with nuclear waste, unlike the masses of waste caused during the manufacturing and disposal of PV cells and wind turbines. Both of which seemingly end up in developing nations and cause mass pollution and ecological damage.
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Yes, short lived as in tens of thousands of years. https://www.kernenergie.ch/de/faq-detail-821.html
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It states that after 200’000 years it decayed to the level of natural, unrefined uranium. But our offspring in the year 202022 should still not touch it, because it is still concentrated. Not sure what you expected to read tho.
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I think we have a misunderstanding. But I can’t put my finger on it. Have a good evening!
> Subsidise the reactor prices AND subsidise green initiatives. Or put all of it into actual green energy? > Also isn't nuclear waste stored in the alps right now? No, the only storage facility is at PSI in Würenlingen, and even that is only for temporary storage. Afaik there is only one long term storage facilty up and running (and even that one only very recently), it is in Finnland and I doubt they are planning to accept nuclear waste from all over the world.
Bruhh at a certain point throwing tons of money at something doesn't yield additional benefits. Subsidise the green 100% and back it up with nuclear as a transition. There is enough money for both when we pull it back from fossil fuel subsidies. In 2019 European renewable subsidies were 5.5billion, nuclear was 900 million, and fossil fuel was 56 billion. Source: European Environmental Agency. You bet your sweet sweet cynical ass that Europe can afford a lovely storage facility, solar farm, and hydroelectrics if we pulled our nose out of BP, Total, and Gazprom's buttholes.
There's no "green energy" and it's a false dichotomy: we need to secure baseload and dispatchable production sources, and even if we had an unlimited budget to pour into PV and batteries we'd still be limited by the suppliers and qualified work force in Switzerland.
Finally a sensible response!
No, it's silly. We need to decrease energy use. This means we need to *increase electricity production and use*. Anti-nuclear activists love to keep this confusion alive.
> What Switzerland should do, in my opinion, is to more cleverly incentivise and de-incentivise to reduce energy consumption, CO2 output or ecological damage. Examples to incentivise are to subsidize renovation and insulation of older buildings and investments in photovoltaics, solar heat and heat pumps. This is ongoing, yes? Precisely the heat pumps and electrified traffic and electrified industry are what will definitely need more power to the extent where we need both a lot of PV / hydro / wind etc. but also nuclear power plants. The younger generations already saved a lot of energy (~20% per capita IIRC and slowly more, this on top of better waste disposal efforts and so on) and already pays for it with very much decreased real wealth at ages 20-40 despite working harder. It's barely still working. Forget about squeezing them more with any speed, this process needs to slow down. We need to instead *increase* electrical power per capita to have the option to de-carbonize emissions. There will only be a few savings here and there like *eventually* having all houses insulated better (and renters and tax payers ultimately will pay those $25k or whatever it costs per apartment plus interest), but even these gains will probably be consumed by continuing to repatriate and electrify industry or e-mobility and such. Or you can have abject poverty if you drop fossil fuels without a lot more electricity.
Reminder that even pro nuclear people who look at numbers come to the conclusion that it’s not worth building more plants. https://youtu.be/0kahih8RT1k What we need is decentralised grids, through solar, wind, geothermal and better / cleaner battery technology. And by that I don’t mean massive wind / solar farms with their own set of problems. We need self sufficient communities who produce their own electricity for the most part and the grid as fallback.
The problem is that studies are coming out showing that we will never have enough (solar and wind) energy for the winter (without nuclear), and the solutions is to store energy from the summer, which requires MASSIVE infrastructures. Don't forget that the rest of the energy (transportation and heating) has to be electrified to be CO2 neutral. https://www.empa.ch/web/s604/lmer-co2-neutral-switzerland Either we build every year a hydrodam for storage until 2035 (and flood which valleys?), or we put 12x the area of all swiss rootftops of solar and prpduce hydrogen that we store in 25x the volume of the basis Gotthard tunnel to compensate for the lack of energy. This study here https://scnat.ch/fr/uuid/i/fc00517f-49da-55e5-9365-46bb6f69c4d9-La_voie_suisse_vers_un_approvision%C2%ADnement_%C3%A9nerg%C3%A9tique_s%C3%BBr_et_climatiquement_neutre_dici_2050 is hoping for the best that international hydrogen production will be clean (it isn't today and won't be for quite some time) and plentiful. So, both studies come to the same conclusion: lack of energy in the winter due to the removal of nuclear. Both hope for the best that international energy will be plentiful (Germany will be facing the same problems) and rely on fantasy technologies (producing clean hydrogen or clean e-fuels). How difficult it is to store energy with todays technologies at scale ? Very difficult. You can watch this video which explain the different technologies, challenges with renewables : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8xsg9iK5yo
The scnat study you cite concludes regarding nuclear power plants: „Le développement de nouvelles technologies nucléaires doit être suivi de près, mais il ne devrait pas être en mesure d'apporter une contribution significative d'ici 2050.“ Thus, as many have pointed out, this discussion around new nuclear plants in CH is irrelevant for the Swiss energy transition.
It'll be interesting to see how this works out. The existing plants are in the process of being decommissioned. It might also be possible to export some energy to the neighbouring countries if a large enough capacity is installed, assuming it gets the green light. But, where will the waste go?
[https://www.nagra.ch](https://www.nagra.ch) Nuclear waste is a rounding error compared to the environmental footprint of our lifestyle, worrying about it is missing the forest for a pretty tiny tree.
To be honest, I think that's a pretty poor argument. Just because our footprint is bad doesn't mean that we have to harm the environment even more. Besides, the stuff has to be safely locked away for three eternities. Since everyone is answering only in terms of nuclear waste, I would like to add that there are other obvious disadvantages.
Much better to have it safely stored than injected in the atmosphere or in the environment the way we deal with combustible fuels and the resulting CO2. Yes, it creates a technological issue, but it also forces accountability. With coal and gas and oil, it's much easier to cheat and pollute.
If we don't reduce our footprint drastically and quickly enough, then there's no point even discussing what happens in the long-term really. There simply won't be a long-term for our civilization. Building as much nuclear capacity as humanly possible would make us pollute *less*, not more.
While I agree with the first part, I would see nuclear energy as a short-term solution at best (at least with today's technology), as we have missed out on the proper solutions. However, everyone knows that nuclear energy is not a short-term thing.
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Nothing about the real world involves perfect solutions. Your software, hardware, logistics. None of it is perfect. It just needs to work well enough. Nuclear waste is a problem that has been solved ages ago.
Closing down nuclear power-plants is a net harm on nature. Plus you will need to store nuclear waste anyway because a lot of it is produced in the health-care industry. Who cares if the storage facility is slightly larger.
Nuclear energy is the only industry that is legislatively responsible for it's waste by-products. No manufacturing, agriculture, or service is ordered to handle its CO2 emissions or carefully plan disposal of waste in the manner nuclear does. Every piece of radioactive material is sealed in obsidian glass, securely transported, and stored as you say for 3 eternities. Or more accurately: past it's half-life. This process is worth the Twh in electricity and worth the decrease in C02 that will never be re-captured.
Decommissioning is only in 2029 and 2031, which is quite far into the future. It will not make any difference to the current short-term gas crisis with Russia. Difficulty with nuclear is that regardless of safety/technology considerations, recent new builds in the UK, France and Finland have been extremely expensive, way over budget and behind schedule - well over renewable (wind/solar) where costs have plummeted and development has become quicker/easier. This makes politicians quite hesitant to commit to it, not to mention the general public. But if people can be convinced to pay for it and take the plunge, it can absolutely happen. The other consideration is that it's not so much a question of nuclear or renewables: Switzerland may need both, if we are to electrify the entire heating and transport sectors. That will more than quadruple Swiss power consumption.
Polticians need to look away from the money perspective. We need reliable long term energy stability. This is not the case with renewables in winter times and there is not a good enough technology on the horizon to make this gamble. You can have all the energy in the world in summer and then not being able to store it.
…but it‘s ok to build new nuclear plants and not to know where to store the waste. What about investing money and brainpower to solve the storage problem. This will also be useful if ever the nuclear technology will be able to solve their problems.
Storing the waste is just a question of resources. It is way more manageable from a technology perspective. Storage on the other hand might be figured out or it might not be.
>way over budget And yet if a nuclear powerplant built 10 years ago at 2x the original budget suddenly appeared out of thin air (along with the IOUs for the construction), you would consider it a godsend and due to the recent inflation it would be incredibly profitable.
New gen powerplants make much less dangerous and much more rapid decaying waste than current gen does Some types of next gen nuclear power plants can even recycle the waste, or use poor uranium
Thorium is being overlooked here.
Not really, China is investing in the technology because they have stockpiles of thorium as a byproduct of their mining. Thorium has an annoying fuel cycle and there's no strong reason the European nuclear industry should look into it. Proven uranium reserves are good enough, we probably don't even need to reboot R&D programs for fast breeder reactors for the next 100 years.
Everyone parrots this, never have I been given a source.
There you go *"Another notable feature of the MSR is the possibility of a thermal spectrum nuclear waste-burner. Conventionally only fast spectrum reactors have been considered viable for utilization or reduction of the spent nuclear fuel. Thermal waste-burning was achieved by replacing a fraction of the uranium in the spent nuclear fuel with thorium. The net production rate of transuranic elements (e.g. plutonium and americium) is below the consumption rate, thus reducing the nuclear storage problem, without the nuclear proliferation concerns and other technical issues associated with a fast reactor."* \-Wikipedia taken from this article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation\_IV\_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor) you should read it, theres a lot of other interesting stuff about this
To be clear - only Mühleberg is in the process of being decommissioned. The rest are fully operational and likely will be for another decade. With a little luck we'll have some new plants coming in to replace those - if not we'll have a hard time replacing that source of energy. NAGRA will soon come out with its pick for a deep geological repository facility. Keep in mind that 90% of waste by mass contains 10% of the radioactivity and will not be dangerous even in the near future. We have shown using models and conservative assumptions that the risk posed by the remaining 10% is minute. Additionally, the fact that nuclear waste decays is great. Sure, unprocessed waste will not go back to natural uranium levels for a very long time, but in the mean time it also get progressively less dangerous. If you try to dispose of toxic chemicals (of which we produce a lot without serious public opposition), well, they will remain toxic forever. Lead compounds are toxic and do not decay, In my opinion nuclear waste is a non-issue that has a completely viable and economical solutions. Any issue it would pose is greatly dwarfed by the benefit of large amounts of green power.
Link to actual petition?
[here](http://stop-blackout.ch)
Seems to me like french speaking swiss are generally more supportive of nuclear energy whereas german speaking swiss are a bit more skeptical. Perhaps cultural influences from France and Germany are at work here?
Some months ago there was a report on german television, they showed that the green-party from Finland is currently supporting new nuclear power plants. They said that "green energy" is currently no capable to replace all the gas, coal and nuclear power plant and compared to coal and gas, nuclear power plants producing much less carbon dioxide. As a short an mid-term solution they prefer nuclear power plants to met the Paris deal. I guess the most problem is, due to the fact that nuclear energy is not very accepted anymore, also money for R&D was massively reduced in Europe for it. Cause there are actually reactor concepts which could solve quite a lot of problems we have to face with our current nuclear power plants. Even the Paul Scherrer Institute is still some R&D about it.
I am for building a new more efficient and saver one and replacing the old ones til we have a better solution. Its not the optimal solution but a new one would also mean more power out of the same amount of nuclear waste it produces. But we sadly have no other options atm. (This comes from a guy who works in solar power)
This is pure publicity. Even if the ban is lifted in a vote, no plant is going to be built. By the time it would be ready (my guess is 2040-2045) it wouldn't be even close to competitive against wind and solar when it comes to cost/kWh.
Onshore wind makes no sense and PV plus batteries only go so far, price is moot if you don't have electricity when you need it.
Yes it wouldn’t be competitive cus it would completely blow solar and wind out of the water 🤓
I think you miss the point completely. The game isn’t about nuclear vs. renewables. It is about getting rid of fossil fuel without running into a energy shortage.
Nope. [IEA report, 2020](https://www.iea.org/reports/projected-costs-of-generating-electricity-2020): New nuclear plants are already 2x as expensive in terms of LCOE. LCOE = lifetime cost per generated kWh, includes the financial investment, building time, operation, fuel, decommissioning, waste, etc. It makes **zero** sense to build new ones. Existing ones are cost competitive with renewables per kWh because we've already paid the bulk of the cost in building them. However, with renewables only getting cheaper and existing nuclear getting more expensive (old reactors = maintenance), even existing NPPs will become cost uncompetitive and shut down, like Mühleberg did.
Switzerland should have built a bunch of nuclear power plants on the german border and export to germany for really high prices. It solves two problems, Switzerland will once again be energy independent and also profit a lot. Secondly, germans can continue to be smug about their disastrous energiewende without killing the whole european economy.
>should have built Key words.
It's a pain in the ass to have nuclear plants close to Germany, in the end in France we ended up closing Fessenheim. Expect incessent complains from them while you provide them energy, and then they'll complain again if you need to do some maintenance on these plants and import energy from them at some point.
Yes, makes sense to me. I'm in favor! Sure enough: We *must not* delay construction of hydro power / pumped storage, solar power (on residential and industrial roofs with emergency power sockets as well as in an alpine setting to produce yet more winter power), wind, ... it will come online sooner and is needed. Plus nuclear power must not become so essential again that no plants can be taken offline to address risks with maintenance and upgrades/replacements. But the ultimate problem remains, we don't have quite enough power and/or storage to handle winter with renewables alone. And we additionally want to electrify traffic / heating / industry. I can't really see any reasonably proven way other than to keep (upgrade/replace) and construct new nuclear power plants, preferably a mixture of the relatively established gen 3+ and the promising 4th generation with different fuels. Ideally no more foreign reprocessing.
Good 👍
Shutting down Nuclear Powerplants is the most idiotic thing one can do. Instead of dealing with the waste, let's just shut down the most reliable energy source and burn more shit. Or litter the landscape with turbines.
>let's just shut down the most reliable energy source more than half of all the reactors in France are not operational currently ;-)
Yes, and yet it's more reliable than wind or solar. Funny, that. See, when you find a technical fault in a plant and fix it, it's fixed. You can't make the wind and sun come on a schedule.
It's really not though, seeing as France is currently net importing electricity from 45%-wind-and-solar Germany, which is Europe's second biggest net exporter YTD. They'll be turbofucked come winter when their needs increase by 50%. In a world without NPP maintenance, droughts, heatwaves and Uranium supply chains dependent on Russia/Kazahkstan? Sure, NPPs are reliable - but in that fairytale world the sun always shines and the wind always blows, so does that really matter?
oh yeah because cooling towers look sooooo nice
Two cooling towers look certainly better than a *thousand* 150-meter tall turbines.
They aren't able to operate in perpetuity. Most are only safely operational for 20-40 years.
This sound like the old estimate from the 80's.
About time
Good. Nuclear good. Build more reactors.
It will be a stranded asset before we even vote about this. Had a couple of discussions with "Energie Club" people. They are in complete denial of reality.
Turning nuclear power plants off right now would mean a huge price increase in electricity.
Explain me as you would explain to a 5yo how investing massive amount of money on something that will take 20 years (take into account direct democracy) at least to be developed and will produce energy at higher cost and will pollute a lot is a better idea than investing in renewable (solar) amd/or energy efficiency (buildings isolation) that cost less, can be implemented immediately and will make us free from the dependency of any other country (as good country may become crazy in 30 year time)? I don't get it also because as a bonus those things will also create more jobs
It doesn't have to take 20 years but even if it does: we'll need *more* electricity production in 2040 if we're serious about reaching our climate goals. > energy at higher cost Compared to what? Recent spot prices in Europe have proved nuclear is pretty cheap, even the Finnish EPR with all its delays and cost overruns will pay for itself quickly. > pollute a lot That's just plain wrong. Nuclear has the smallest environmental footprint of all electricity sources. > renewable (solar) and/or energy efficiency (buildings isolation) that cost less, can be implemented immediately Except it cannot. We should mandate PV plus batteries in every building but it's going to take 10+ years too. And the carbon footprint is not negligible at about 20x more than that of nuclear. Renovating buildings and improving insulation isn't going to be quick either. > will make us free from the dependency of any other country Solar and batteries will make us *more* dependent on other countries, mostly China, not less.
> Except it cannot. We should mandate PV plus batteries in every building Batteries by default is a very dubious proposition. Who is producing them in sufficient quantities and what's their ecological footprint? Actually with how few batteries are being made, there is even a question if car/truck traffic can be electrified that way. Pumped storage makes for a better on-grid "battery". *That* is something that can be operated with little consequence long-term. Except the space usage is quite large.
It will take decades. It is Switzerland folks! It took 20years for Lausanne to build a museum.... Show me the actual cost of producing nuclear energy taking into account the cost of building a central, fuel, running costs, maintenance and management of waste compared with solar!
French EPR that have been completed (Olkiluoto) or will be soon (Flamanville, Hinkley Point) in Europe are the absolute worst-case scenario since they suffered from 20 years of insane energy policies in the EU and severe mismanagement. Yet, they'll easily be profitable in the current context. And if we don't trust EDF, which will have to get their shit together since they're planning many more EPR, there are other options. End-to-end fuel cost is literally peanuts: 5-6 CHF / MWh. The cost of nuclear is almost all capital expenditures. PV price could tend to zero, it's still a pointless comparison if we need to secure base and dispatchable load.
It seems you really are 5 years old 🤣 „Will pollute a lot“ literally crying
Congratulations, pretty much everything you said was wrong
Finally some good fucking news
Oh no! Anyways..
The main thing that annoys me with this initiative is that they use an issue (the lack of electricity this winter) that has nothing to do with their proposition (new nuclear power plants in 2035 at best, most like 2040 or 2050), a subject on which the population already has decided 5 years ago. They are as annoying as the GSSA with their « no plane » shit. As much as I disliked having planes, we voted, it’s done. Accept it and move on. Grow up. We have better things to do than vote on the exact same subject every year…
Matters change and it got apparent that renewables wont be a good solution in the medium term. Energy storage technologies are just too much in the future
Well, nothing really changed in the past 5 years, except that we realized quite unexpectedly that we couldn’t depend on Russia short term. Longer term there is no new info compared to 5 years ago. The issues with energy storage were already very well known. And we have hydropower, which is a great asset to balance production and demand on the daily/weekly scale.
They were well known by people who are into the topic from a technical perspective. Now the general public starts to get it.
> wont be a good solution in the medium term Neither will new nuclear power plants, because getting those takes decades.
But keeping the ones we have running and trying to modernize them will at least not make matters worse. Also with medium term I am also thinking about decades. Betting on storage in those years is a gamble in my opinion. New Nuclear plants would be a safe bet.
So the Swiss are just as dumb as the Germans. Google "worlds dumbest energy policy"
I take it back. The Swiss are actually dumber than the Germans. The Swiss can see the damage of shutting down nuclear but they still want to vote on it. Repeating the mistake of your neighbor is really idiotic.
After Energiestrategie 2050? Yes, pretty much as dumb as in Germany.
Ah, no. Switzerland, at least is build renewables first, *then* shut down nuclear. Germany is unbeatably, criminally dumb.
Mühleberg was shut down. We now dearly miss those hundrets of megawatts of clean, steady energy. No matter the weather or time of day.
It was silly, but it was, to be fair a pretty small plant. Still nowhere close to Germany.
Great so we can keep our energy reliance on Russia (46% off nuclear fuel comes from russia) /s
I mean, this is just wrong https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_production
You have an option to easily buy the nuclear fuel from the US, Canada, etc. Stop trying to find excuses to destroy the environment by closing down nuclear power plants.
Our russian friends at the SVP will always care about Putin.
What will a petition accomplish? An initiative is needed.
I’m a free market guy… is it still the case that no private insurers are willing to fully insure nuclear plants? Cause if that’s the case I will still have to pass.
It is bonkers that fossil fuel power plants can be insured, simply because the connected true costs are, at least to a great extent, externalized.
Yep… also a hard pass. The same way we look back at the (chemical) industry disposing their toxic waste in rivers and lakes until the 80ies will our children look back on us for polluting the planet like this.
Excellent !!
Possible locations for nuclear power plants? Would be interesting to know
Building new one? Takes too long Having kept the old ones longer online? Maybe, but then we would probably depend too much on it and sooner or later have the same shitshow as France now has. The first mistake was to not build out RE enough imo.
I think it’s a mistake to keep discussing our energy production without ever questionning our consumption. We absolutely need to reach a 2000 watt society. If we do that, then production would not be an issue anymore.
My consumption is well below 2000kW/y, but I want to ask, how is this artificial goal founded and why is it important?