Where can I get more information on this? Wasn't fukushima total disaster in that it was badly maintained and in a bad location? These two pre-conditions don't seem to apply to the plants germany had.
Why do you mention Chernobyl and Fukushima together? Fukushima basically only did some economic damage, Chernobyl was a catastrophe.
Also given how densely populated Germany is, it's wildly irresponsible that they operate so many coal plants, it's literally killing thousands every year. Even if they had a Chernobyl style disaster every 10 years it would still be a lot safer than the way they're generating power right now.
Maybe saddest part of the whole Fukushima was that it was entirely avoidable. If proper planning and implementation was actually done. I expect Germany and European nations being culturally better to get things fixed.
My understanding was that root-cause was old design and not sufficiently secure back-up power and failure to get such on site. Which could have been done, but was not.
The reactors in Fukushima and their protection against flooding and cooling failure would have never passed German safety standards.
Japan’s nuclear safety standards were way too lenient before the Fukushima accident happened.
All the changes that were implemented in Japan after the disaster have been standard in Germany for decades such as hydrogen recombiners, bunkered emergency generators and a filtered containment depression system.
If any German nuclear reactor had been standing in Fukushima, there would have been no accident!
The Fukushima reactors and a lot of the german ones were built by the same company. They overlooked the flood risk on the japanese coast (which has huge tsunamis every few decades). What did they overlook elsewhere? After Chernobyl, politicians promised that western reactors could not possibly explode. Fukushima proved them wrong.
The “safe and reliable” part was wrecked in the general public’s perception by Chernobyl and Fukushima. Germany’s decision to close all their existing plants came shortly after the latter disaster.
Yes, Fukushima was nowhere near as catastrophic as Chernobyl, but it was very effective in creating the impression that this kind of thing will keep happening; that power plants aren’t safe even in an impeccably diligent culture like Japan (as it’s perceived in the West); that the tireless anti-nuclear campaigning of the preceding decades had been right all along. That’s the kind of public mood that politicians can ill afford to ignore.
fukushima plant was obsolete and built in a not great area (probably due to local political squabble), but it was in the process to slowly (backroooms deals between energy provider and gov) be modernized to current standard, thing that contained the disaster as other reactors had already moved their generators on the roof instead to keeping it at ground level. Japan is not a great example for corporate behaviour
It's important to note that Chernobyl and Fukushima have quite different (multiple!) causal factors leading to their meltdowns. Chernobyl was mostly do to highly secretive nature of nuclear (with information actively being suppressed by the Soviet Union), lack of safety equipment, poor staffing, poor response time, and a lack of knowledge of physics (xenon spiking). People mostly chalk it up to incompetence, but saying that's all that happened is naive. A lot of this isn't as surprising since the tech was very new at the time and the cultural warfare going on. Fukushima was a combination of cheaping out on safety concerns and a lack of scientific understanding that such a large earthquake could happen in the region (remember, that was the largest in recorded history for the area. Tsunami records indicating similar sizes are hard to differentiate fact from fiction). We've also learned a lot about fault dymanics since then (e.g. that Cascadia can have a massive quake too). Germany on the other hand is geologically stable and there's not many environmental concerns like tsunamis, earthquakes, or tornadoes. So we just have to hope we've learned some safety things in the last 50 years.
I always wondered why was Germany concerned about the events in Fukushima as that was caused by the earthquake/tsunami. Is that a common phenomenon in Germany?
German here - it is not because of panic over a tsunami, but about the complete incompetence shown in the Fukushima disaster. The plant had construction faults, the operations after the disaster failed to prevent a preventeable disaster. Yes, we won't have a tsunami at any our nuclear power plants. But whatever else has been overlooked during their construction, where are the operating companies maybe cutting too many corners to save costs?
What I don’t understand is how those two incidents are even relevant. Chernobyl happened because of a faulty design + mismanagement and Fukushima was located on a region prone to earthquakes/tsunami’s caused by earthquakes. The factors do not really apply to Germany. And even if it did, the deaths caused by those accidents were quite low. Meanwhile coal pollution is killing people by the thousands but this is somehow ok?
I think the sole reason the west moved away from Nuclear is because it sounds scary and because the oil countries had a strong interest in maintaining the non-nuclear status quo.
Not sure, Fukushima was pretty scary considering the high esteem Japanese engineering has in Germany. Not sure what the deciding factor was, but indeed their remaining run time was shortened, the 2001 decision was targetting for a shutdown between 2025 and 2027.
The fukushima plant had a poor safety factor, in re the backup cooling power source. It's not as if the disaster happened in a vacuum, there was also a tsunami and the plant was not build outside of a potential tsunami zone.
An unfortunate accident, and basically the worst case scenario for that reactor design. Not to mention there was an earthquake and a tsunami.
And the fact that the current death toll stands at 1 (likely to increase though) and Fukushima is perfectly habitable now (and has been for a while now). Almost 20000 people died due to the earthquake and tsunami. Only 1 due to the nuclear disaster.
Fukushima disaster should be a footnote in history. It’s not a valid representation of safety of nuclear power.
As a European, I’m far more concerned about the dependence on Russian natural gas (Germany completely abandoning nuclear; Nordstream 2) than I am about a reactor blowing up.
The tsunami killed 15,899 people with 6,157 injured and 2,529 people missing and in 2015, 228,863 were still living away from their homes [1]. But that story was completely overshadowed by the Fukishima melt down that killed 1 person because anti-nuclear stories are media catnip. It also led Germany to commit fully to the shutdown of it's nuclear plants and a 2019 article found that the increase in air pollution will kill 1100 people a year and an increase in C02 of 36.2 megatons per year. So where is the real disaster?
Mentioning Fukushima while talking about Germany demonstrates his point that it's hysteria. Fukushima happened on an island that has regular monsoons, is prone to tsunamis and prone to earthquakes.
Germany is fucking boring. The rains here are moderate. One half of its coast line is a barely connected inland see that has almost no flood/ebb. The other half is protected by the UK from strong water movements. And earthquakes here, if they ever happen, are absolutely tiny.
You'd need to multiply your prediction there by maybe 100 to balance out just how much safer germany is as a country compared to japan.
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