There was no "green energy delusion," just lots of Green Party grifters who don't actually care about climate change. Germany never thought they had enough renewables to close the gap. They knew they didn't, and just didn't care.
Green energy is awesome, it's the cheapest form of energy, and it's growing exponentially. But it's just crazy to shut off nuclear power plants that were already operational and working fine.
German engineering is famous. If there's any country I would trust to safely operate reactors, it would be Germany. But, er, until 2011, I would have said the same about Japan. Perhaps the Japanese wouldn't have had the problem if they had designed and built their own reactors from scratch?
Everywhere there is free speech, people are afraid of nuclear power. You can't make a primal emotion go away with sweet reason. We need to acknowledge the failure modes of PWB's and for the next generation, build reactors with a "dead man's switch" to passivate the reactor. If anything goes wrong, it dumps the core to isolate the fuel into small batches which cool quickly. We also need to address the (better founded, imo) fear of transuranic waste. Not all of our future reactors, but definitely some of them, should be based on thorium fuel.
Another thing is that we should be building smaller plants, and spreading them around more widely. People who actually live near big plants, don't fear them. But they're self-selected. If we took the small plant technology from nuclear subs (as Carter wanted to do) and built one near every major city, familiarity would erode the fear that ignorant people have.
We also need to get serious about reprocessing. The US currently does what Japan did, which is store old fuel in the same plant as a working reactor. Old fuel generates heat, it evaporates its own cooling pool. The last place on Earth you want that, is inside a plant which is melting down. Nobody wants that transuranic waste in their backyard, which is why we need to separate useable fuel from raw waste, then separate the short lived and extremely long lived waste. The short lived waste gets reprocessed again in a few years (it transmutes) while the long lived waste goes in permanent storage at Yucca Mountain. Screw the state government, they signed a contract allowing the Federal government to whatever it wanted with the mountain, and they have profited from the excavation and transport. They get bulky but nearly harmless waste which has to be stored forever. If its any consolation to them, that waste is no more dangerous underground, than natural uranium deposits.
While it may be true that nuclear power is the cheapest and safest (baseload power), it could be safer. And then maybe it wouldn't be the cheapest. I was once anti-nuclear, because I did not trust government to manage waste responsibly, on a long time scale. And
that is still my concern. We need to explore even safer options, and particularly not store waste in reactor buildings. The selling point of nuclear now, is that it has virtually zero emissions, and that's worth paying for.
www.cnn.com
Germany.
