Germany Sets New Renewable Energy Record in 2011

If Germany gets significant power from 'biomass' and turns off nukes, they'll actually add to emissions. Biomass isn't 'sustainable' because of its excessive demands on land, nutrients, water, etc. Nuclear power takes many forms and even if Germany does the au-courant political thing of dissing nukes that have been running safely for decades, they'll fall behind in emissions.

In fact, German scientists have already calculated that turning off German nukes by 202x will have the effect of negating all past German emissions reductions.

But who cares if the politics works, eh?

In fact, there are only two renewables -- solar and nuclear. Geothermal is a form of nuclear, since it depends entirely on te decay of Thorium & Uranium in the Earth's core.

Fortunately, the Chinese are wiser than German politicians and are planning about 50 new conventional nukes, plus beginning work on Thorium molten-salt reactors, which the US invented & ran 40 years ago but never deployed, because, well, they couldn't make useful bomb material! Yes indeed, China moves out ahead again.
;]

Germany has assured itself an economic boost that will grow in the future as small businesses and residents realize more income from the free energy from the sun. Cleaner air, a healthier populace and an indifference to oil (and other polluting energy source) pricing, are great side benefits.
Has anyone calculated in dollars how much much income this free energy has saved Germany to this point? Has their been a 25 year calculation? Have the calculations included having inadvertently built an infrastructure that supports charging electric car and bike batteries (for free)?

Hi,

Here are my comments.

1. If Germany reached records in the realization of renewable energy plants in 2010, this is because Germany has decided to now suppress and/or lower subsidiation on the biogas plants that will be build from 2012. So, all planned/current biogas project founders URGE TO ORDER AND BUILD before end of this year.

Next year will be a dramatic year for German RE equipment companies.


2. What concerns the high power wind turbine plants, more than 30 % of these are for sale because they are not profitable ...


3. Who am I ? An experienced international business development director in 2 world leading German manufacturers of these sectors.

@ Dr Alex: anyone qualifying the Germans less wise should take a look at their own country debt and budgetary balance, and compare it with Germany's. Furthermore: there's about 400 nukes globally, 3 of them have melted down causing unprecendented nature and health disaster. That's quite a lot, given the consequences. Last but not least, renewables give employment to about 1 mln Germans, as opposed to little economic value added from nukes. Now who's wise?

Following the closure of 8 nuclear power plants in June, France has been contributing hugely to keeping Germany's lights on with net exports of presumably nuclear power. Despite this, on any sunny day this summer, Germany has been exporting electricity, presumably to France. This is probably caused by Germany's inability to integrate this expensive (20 - 40 cents/kWh?) power into the German system as the equivalent of 14 closed nuclear power stations start and stop between morning and evening. Instead, German consumers are subsidizing French consumers at 30c/kWh for all that surplus PV electricity.

In the mean time, as the "experienced business development manager" (comment 3) explains, there is blood all over the floor in the renewables sector itself and all four primary generators are "on the ropes" with massive falls in their stock market value.

This will be not very comfortable for German consumers who will have to pay dearly to keep their lights on.

IMHO of course!

@Hugh - Please keep in mind, the average Germans consumes about half of what the average Joe consumes in the US. So the price is irrelevant; it's still a pretty cheap bill.

Who am I? Some guy whose wife's family has a property downwind from a nuke plant and 3 out of 5 uncles have died of cancer; as have way too many neighbors.

Oops, "Anonymous" is back with nastiness but no manly identity!
;]

3 nukes were damaged in Japan after being shut down safely, yes. Their damage and fuel melting was caused by an unprotected design for both known tsunamis and known generator problems.

'Next time you get in your car, Anonymous, be sure to check the brakes were designed to stop it. If not, it's a TEPCO design -- get out. If so, it's like all the other 400+ reactors around the world -- incredibly safe...
http://tinyurl.com/63pe99a
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/5298-safety-on-thecheap
http://tinyurl.com/45mvlz7

As for uncles & cancer, stop smoking or have a DNA scan. Maybe the family likes banana splits or flying a lot, or they lived near a coal plant. Any of those produces far more radiation than any US/Euro nuke.

But what are facts to someone who hadn't the gumption to use a real name?

@ Dr Alex: (what kind of a name is that?!) as yourself, there are quite some nuclear supporters on this site. Shouldn't you guys be on www.nuclearenergyworld.com?

DrAlexC is absolutely in error. Mining and processing uranium to the stage it is suitable for fuel rods relases as much CO2 as a coal fired PS of equivalent output. It is by no means greenhouse gas clear. On top of this it is in my view totally irresponsible to generate materials with half lives measured in many many thousands of years, and particularly Plutonium which had to disappear before life could develope. A fission reactor actually makes it. UGH!

David, what's the life of Poly-Chlorinated Biphenyls in the environment? What's the life of Mercury? Suggest you get straight on the difference between chemical activity and radio-activity.

If long-lived elements were so dangerous, then the most dangerous would be hydrogen, as in all our water. So don't breathe or drink!

Nuclear fission in reactors produces two kinds of elements -- long lived (Plutonium, Americium...) and short-lived fission fragments (Radium, Krypton...a list of about 20). You can eat Plutonium because: a) it's long life means it's not very radioactive; and b) because it's not used by your body (as PCBs can be). You can breathe 85Krypton because like sucking a Helium balloon, it isn't used by your body either, and comes out in the next breath. Its radioactivity is alpha particles or electrons, which can't even penetrate paper or skin.

The short-lived ones generate about 7% of a reactor's heat output and stay inside the reactor. The long-lived ones only come out if we want them to. Short-lived elements inside reactor fuel shouldn't be allowed out unless benign, like noble gas Krypton. Dangerous ones are those used by living cells, such as 131Iodine, or 137Cesium. Iodine is gone in a few weeks, Cesium takes decades, so is to be kept inside reactors.

Problem is, most folks have never been told that solid Uranium fuel isn't the only kind of nuclear fuel. That's so 1940s!

40 years ago, far safer, better reactors were designed and operated. The Chinese are now doing that because nuclear power is indeed the safest, most renewable of all mass energy sources. In fact, the designs that avoid Uranium avoid all mining you complain about, all explosions, like Chernobyl or Fukushima, and almost all wastes. Why? Because they make their own fuel inside the reactor and keep everything there until it's consumed...
www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2107710/ngo-fuel-safe-thorium-nuclear-reactors#disp

Anonymous: "Dr Alex: (what kind of a name is that?" -- mine. Feel free to call me any time you're ready to ante up with your own name. 650-400-3071

As a believer in the need for diverse energy resources while we get our renewable energy options in order, I had felt for a long time that nuclear had a place in the mix. After the disaster in Japan, I am not so sure. Regardless of the science, the public and our politics will not stand for it. The safety record for nuclear looks good compared to coal, but it's the "what if" factor that is so scary. And what about the nutjobs?

Let's invest in storage systems for renewables!

As for the juvenile name calling, please leave that to Facebook!

Solar, as a Sierra Club, NRDC, WWF... member/supporter for years, I share your opinion about renewables. Sierra Club, for example, supports efficiency (a great renewable) & solar PV/hot-water on existing structures -- called DG for distributed generation.

The only other renewable is nuclear energy. And, what we see as nukes, built for 60 years, are not 'nuclear energy' in any full sense. In fact, the folks who designed & patented what Fukushima is, & nearly all other commercial reactors were derived from, knew better was possible & necessary, starting in 1962, but that's another topic. Fortunately, China, India & others are following our 1960s lead on safe nukes.

Solar & nuclear are the true renewables because the life of the sun controls one & the life of the universe controls the other. Wind isn't renewable because, as the Chinese have already found, it changes with climate and those 700tons/MW of concrete & steel are just a bit tough to pick up & move. Absurd subsidies & land/sea takings, plus transmission waste, are other reasons wind is far from renewable.

Odd thing about nuclear power is that some think it's sneaky scary -- something very difficult to contain is building up inside those scary looking domes & it'll get out and kill us all, some day somehow.

That just speaks to how our media loves scary stuff to sell ads & don't care how ignorant we are. As a result, coal. oil & gas industries have funded protests around the world when a new nuke is planned. Wonder why? Well a coal plant emits more than 100x the radiation of a nuclear plant, & a nuke plant emits less radiation than eating 2 bananas. Plus, no one has ever died from commercial nuclear in any country adhering to NRC regulations (US, French, German, Swiss, Brit...).

If we truly worried about radiation, we'd close coal plants & build nukes. The latter don't emit mercury, etc., killing >10,000 Americans/year. What wise folks are up to
www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbP5KZQ5yso

If a small to moderate sized meteorite were to hit a uranium plant or even a thorium plant I don't think any of the safety precautions in development or planning could prevent a larger disaster than a meteorite alone.

And if anything that size hit a full stadium, a school, a hospital...?

What's a "small to moderate sized meteorite" anyway? We have a good 600ft one coming near on 8 Nov. Will you bet it might hit one of 400 nukes in the world exactly on center of the containment? Or will you bet it hits something else with lots and lots of deaths? I'll take the 2nd bet -- name your amount, Gary.

Wonder how this "meteorite" thing with nukes got started? Is it the last gasp of arguing against the safest form of mass power generation mankind has ever deployed?

How about something smaller & more likely? A plane landing/taking-off from Logan Field near Boston crashes into just one of the huge LPG tanks nearby. The LPG spills out, ignites, but because it's boiling underneath, it skates with lightning speed across Boston Harbor, up the Charles River, burning everything in sight.

There you go -- ban aircraft flights, maybe just in Boston, or maybe lots of places. Nuke vs plane deaths?

However, since you don't grasp the breadth of nuclear power choices, let's do peruse what happens when a molten-salt reactor is punctured -- nothing. Well, hot liquid salt comes out and runs into the basement. Or, if the reactor is already in the basement, it runs down into the 2nd basement, where it gradually cools, hardens and stays until we decide to clean it up. Because it's a liquid in the reactor, it has no dangerous gas content to release, because that's continually coming out and stored or sold. So the salt released hasn't the dangerous volatiles that spent or in-core solid fuel has trapped inside it, waiting for release either in reprocessing or via your meteorite.

Indeed, despite how safe our kludgy, 1950s Uranium + water reactors are, they've killed no one during operation. Fukushima could have restarted one reactor after the quake to keep power going to cooling systems for all reactors & spent fuel -- Fukushima is a design & management failure, not a nuke failure.

when are we going to learn more about Thermal Depolymerization/

Large enough to disrupt the food chain and ignite all the fissable material at one strike, small enough to not cause extinction on its' own.

How might it disrupt the food chain?
Although debateable I've heard of there being virtually no insect life at the Hirshima and Nagasaki bomb sites (except the hardy cockroach and probably fruit flies which may not sustain life because they would not be a sustainable source of nutrition). If enough radiation takes out a region's ability to support a migratory bird population then the adjoining regions covered by one or more flight path(s) may take a big hit to sustaining life. Will it render us extinct? Probably not. However, it may be cost prohibitive if not impossible to clean the contamination. Maybe part of the issue depends on how much fissable material is on site at the same time.

Moving over to igniting of fissable material,the Hiroshima bomb-Little Boy (unlike the imploding Nagasaki bomb-Fat Man) uses a gun method to cause a chain reaction. An impact large enough to replicate gun method-like conditions ubiquitously seems very plausible. Especially considering that the bomb containment shell's design (strong enough to compress into a chain reaction), might be replicated via compressability against the layout of the architecture. Will a meteor strike cause a large nuclear explosion? Probably not, however it may be worthwhile to run computational simulations of all the relevant physics related to meteor impact such as meteor size, angle of travel, velocity, compression, material selection, temperature, fluid flow, physical layout, etc....
The fruit beared by this type of study may find a chain reaction is possible and remedies easily addressed. Additionally, certain layouts may be more prone to higher clean-up costs than others after impact. Which in turn, can prompt improvements in facility design, better selection of plants to shut down and maybe viable alterations to existing plants as well.

On a final note, one may argue that a meteor that causes a cataclysmic chain reaction or similar radiation dispersion effects will be no smaller than one to cause mass extinction.
Such proof of cataclysmic meteor comparison doesn't exist to my knowledge and pursuing such studies may yield useful insights into spacecraft reactor design.

Gary says "I've heard of..." So Gary, we've heard you're a _____. True?

There are facts, and we can all choose to study them, or we can just lazyboy our way through foolish things. Your choice, Gary. Of course, if your doctor or airline pilot had done that...

So look up Hiroshima & Nagasaki wildlife. Even do it for Chernobyl -- there are scientific studies, books, articles and, of course, urban myths. Those last are easier on the brain, right Gary?

You could also learn a bit about nuclear physics. You show you scratched the surface, by dropping a fact or two about our first A-bombs. But, you clearly don't have a clue about why a nuclear reactor's fuel can't make a bomb, even if you steer your favorite meteorite to it.

I'll give you a hint: learn what LEU & HEU mean for reactors vs bombs.

Then study what bomb "yield" means and what actually happens to all that fissile stuff we work so hard to get into a bomb and have arrange itself just oh so right to actually deliver some output energy. Then you may grasp why meteors, or any other "cataclysmic" event can't do the job, especially for the lousy starting material in nuclear power plants.

You could also look up "natural fission reactors", as operated by Ma Nature a billion or so years ago at Oklo Gabon -- wow, nothing bad happened!

But, you can also continue to delude yourself. Just don't try deluding others here.

GrandBill is talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization perhaps?

First off, we're many many gigatons of CO2 emissions behind the 8 ball today, so making anything to burn in engines is a poor idea. Internal combustion wastes >60% of all fuel energy as exhaust heat. So burning anything for energy of motion (vehicles, generators...) is what needs to have stopped a decade ago. Oops.

That's part of all the scientific recommendations given our Congress & Presidents since 1962. We were supposed to be generating all electricity via safe breeder reactors as of 2000. We were to be desalinating water that way too, as the UAE is beginning to do (they want our $ for their oil).

And, for essential liquid fuels, as for jets, we'd already have been synthesizing fuels from CO2 & water via thermo-electric processing connected directly to nuclear plants.

Too bad we're so much smarter today than our predecessors, eh?
;]

So, now we depend on China & other countries to actually do what we long ago heard our scientists & engineers advising us to do. Oh yeah, if we'd done that, global warming, climate change, sea rise, acidification would be far smaller issues, especially for our kids & grandkids.

Double oops.

http://tinyurl.com/6xgpkfa

Just a thought -- if the report at the URL above had been followed, and we had 700 GW of safe US reactors on line by 2000, what might we be remembering on 11 September 2011? And, how many folks, not with us today, might be going back to work Monday at Towers One and Two?

Ignorance & cupidity cost.

To Dr AlexC
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is a public site where people come to give their thoughts, ideas, and ask questions to make an informed decision, regardless if they are right or wrong. Why be a jerk and ruin it for everyone else?
There is no need to be condescending.
All that does is raise the suspicion of biased information that can't be trusted.
Is that what you want?

If you read, Gary, you'll see I said "we". Have you never been guilty of ignorance or cupidity?

I'm not convinced that a meteorite striking a nuclear plant is just as harmless as striking another location. Nor am I convinced that an attack on my writing's point of view was NOT taking place as a RED HERRING against my concerns. Doubts remain

Moving on, I still have questions and points of view to state concerning a meteorite impacting a nuclear site. You can choose to participate or not.

Now back to my concerns.
After further reading (Enriched Uranium-Wikipedia), it seems light water reactors are not at risk of thermonuclear explosion because of the use of Low-Enriched Uranium (LEU) However, above 20% Uranium content LEU becomes HEU and is considered at least weapon(s)-usable some even debate that levels even less are sufficient but become virtually impossible below 6%. Furthermore risk of expolsion is eliminated by keeping the fuel subcritical.
My question moves onto whether or not the other type of reactors out there or the next generation of reactors coming out are taking greater risks to public safety. Perhaps research on newer remediation techniques or creation of remediation friendly fuel blends is desireable IF there is a greater safety issue.

Well Gary, you indeed were not my focus, so please calm yourself.

Glad you started reading some nuke info. By the way, 'thermonuclear explosion' is what an 'augmented' or H-bomb generates, not a fission (Uranium or Plutonium) bomb.

The problem with current water reactors is steam explosions & hydrogen explosions (from dissociated, overheated water or zirconium fuel cladding. That's what the big containment building is for -- a steam pipe rupture inside will cause a 1000:1 expansion (explosion) of steam -- just like the good old days of the Steam Age, when many folks were killed by boiler explosions.

Since the steam has possible radioactive content, it must be contained at up to 160 atmospheres. Thus the great expense of a standard LWR nuke.

The fellows who patented LWRs in 1946 designed & ran unpressurized, water-free reactors in the 1960s, as I've said. These don't offer dangers of explosive dispersal of radioactive material, and they even shut down immediately, without need for power, just gravity.

With the addition of 'fertile' elements, like thorium, they breed their own fissile fuel inside their cores, making just enough to maintain designed power output. An LWR needs much more fuel in its core because the fuel is solid, becomes defective in a year or two, and must be replaced.

The molten-salt reactors have none of the issues with fuel storage, etc. Their fuel & thermal efficiency is so high that 3 of them will fit inside a de-commissioned LWR dome.

So, a meteorite falls -- an MSR is far smaller target than an LWR of the same power, so immediately there's less chance of damage. Its radioactive content is molten salts and noble gasses. The latter are safe to vent under any circumstance because they're biologically inactive. The molten salts are two kinds -- heavy metal salts (Uranium/Thorium Tetrafluoride) & fission-product fluorides. All are exceedingly stable. Fluorides are among the most stable compounds...

...Such salts are extremely dense -- 6-12 times heavier than water. So, if a meteor vaporized a full-scale, 3-meter reactor core (a hard target to hit), the few tons of such heavy salts would be distributed within the ejecta column, falling quickly and near the impact.

Now, the mess would contain mostly ThF4, UF4, PaF4 as the heaviest materials, falling closest to impact. Some are very radioactive, meaning they decay quickly (Pa, 232U...) while others are not radioactive (Th). So the nearby fallout will come down fast and decay quickly.

The dangerous fission products are also bound tightly as fluorides, but being about 1/2 the mass of the fuel fluorides, they'll be dispersed farther. Again, many decay very quickly, others are less radioactive, and decay over longer periods, such as Cesium fluoride. Because a Thorium breeder makes almost no Plutonium etc., the long-lived heavy wastes aren't significant. The main issue is what short-lived fission-product fluorides would be further dispersed by dissolution in water.

Note that this issue is far less serious than the same meteor hitting an LWR, where not only the meteor's impact disperses material, the steam explosion helps & the 100x larger target of stored spent fuel means that dangerous, non-fluoride-bound gasses (131I...), fission products (137Cs...) & long-lived transuranics (Pu, Am...) will constitute a far larger target, widely distributing radioactivity, much of it from biologically active elements.

Given the number of ball games in the US & the number of people occupying such stadia (ok, add hockey), what's the chance a meteor will do more damage hitting 1 30ft MSR out of 500 vs hitting 1 of thousands of huge stadia each occupied for many tens of thousands of person-hours/week?

We can even calculate a modest exclusion zone around the reactor, so that such a hit will have almost no human effect.

To be honest in energy safety, read, for example, the P.Sherrer Inst. -- Human Cost of Energy.

Why does Dr.Alex criticize policy and effort of using and integrating of renewable energies in countries like Germany? Does he prefer to live right next door to nuclear power plant or next to where nuclear waste is buried vs in neighborhoods where houses have solar roofs ? One nuclear accident is one too many. Why kick and scream towards approach and policy of using solar and other cleaner alternative renewable power source?

I'm pretty confident that a Thorium reactor would not be considered a "one nuclear accident is one too many". Do the research and see for yourself. As far as the other nuclear technologies, I am concerned there is hype but would not want to completely eliminate them due to economic and other concerns. Hopefully, Hybrid power systems would come to fruit which integrates several power technologies into one system. Such integration is now taking place in places such as Florida that combines CSP (Concentrated Solar Power) with a hydrocarbon source. Also, Arizona has a hybrid Geothermal/CSP in development (100% Clean Energy). These types of systems are in their infancy and I hope to see them change into next generation systems.

I wonder where the Anonymous Belgian sees places "where nuclear waste is buried"? It's hard to fathom a sentence like that. Especially given Scandinavian towns that actually have vied for conventional LWR waste storage sites, because they actually understand what radioactivity is and where such materials can be safely stored for $.

Of course, the future isn't the type of waste-producing reactor we love to hate, and it wasn't supposed to be by 2000. But that's politicians' faults, not science's or Nature's.

If Anonymous means the French accident at a plant where they used gas to burn up things like worker's smocks, etc., then he should be far more concerned with the coal & gas burning he now advocates instead of nukes -- coal & gas & oil extraction release Radon gas, and other gasses from radioactive elements in the earth -- we have to dig to get combustion fuels, right Anonymous? And coal ash has more dangerous stuff than Uranium ore, so are you concerned about finding where to bury it? You should be, because a nuke produces about a million times the power of coal from each kg put in, and even the wasteful LWRs now produce thousands of times less waste to store than coal plants do.

Then too, coal burning also releases very nasty stuff, like Mercury, which nukes don't release, even when damaged. The list of what Anonymous is suggesting all Europeans (and Eurasians) start breathing by turning off nukes, is long & bad (see what's in the NORM exemptions coal, gas, oil plants, etc. have in the US). That's why you can find a coal plant easily with a geiger counter, but not a nuke.

But ignorance is bloggable, eh?
;]

Hi:

The world is slowly coming around to realizing that tapping the direct energy sources, solar, wind, geo, ocean, etc.. , (I.E. non fuel based sources) coupled with benign storage, is the way to provide clean, passively safe energy.
You have to remember that at the core, power companies have no intrinsic desire to be using energy sources that generate waste that if spread around the planet, would kill every living thing. They are in the business of electric power, not death. Nuclear energy like germ warfare was created to kill people. Generating power from it was a way to keep the death play going...
Only time will tell if a storage or neutralization technology can be found soon enough to rid us and future generations of this horrific mistake...

.....Bill

Oops, Bill's on something, apparently! "Nuclear energy like germ warfare was created to kill" -- no, Fermi & other Nobel winners rightly saw the benefits of nuclear power & in fact, the BAS was founded by some of those folks to protest using fission bombs at all.

It may come as a surprise, William, that none of the 440+ utility reactors in the world have ever caused a nuclear explosion in their 50+ years -- poorly-managed Chernobyl was a steam explosion because it was basically a steam engine. Fukushima was a steam engine as well, but so poorly managed that it couldn't be cooled even when shut down, so generated hydrogen-gas explosions from steam oxidizing Zirconium -- no nuclear bomb -- sad?

And, germs don't die away as fission products do. Nor do PCBs, DDT, dioxin, Mercury, etc. So by turning off nukes, you commit others to some of those threats directly through the air they breathe. Take a good, long whiff, ol' boy.
;]
Remember, local solar = good, massed solar/wind = bad (unless you're the one collecting subsidy). Geothermal is nuclear & emits more radioactive material than any nuke is allowed. Hydro has all been exploited & dams are being removed to correct the damage to fisheries & rivers -- read up on China's 3-Gorges experiment.

So, you can continue to ignorantly talk to yourself, William, but as others learn the facts, your words, thankfully, will fade into oblivion -- just like the wind. Wind isn't a "direct energy source", but inefficiently derived from solar input & requiring ~700tons of fossil-fuel-processed material for each MW of peak (<1/3MW average) capacity.

So take a breath of all the emissions from coal used to make 1 windmill, plus all the emissions from oil/gas extraction/combustion to make the concrete foundation, and all the emissions from the road & transmission-line construction per windmill. And that doesn't even include maintenance & transmission wastes, or relocation when winds change, as China has learned.

HI:

BOMBS??? Did someone say bombs?? I didn't say bombs...
Oh, DrAC said bombs... DrAC has a temperature I Tink..
He has a cold... it must come from making to many paper tigers..
Paper tigers are so much fun to make, colorful, distracting and so easy to burn....
Take two wind mills and call me in the morning...
Hope you feel better soon DR.AC...

.....Bill

Well,Mr.know-it -all from some statistics Dr.Alex, before going off on comments,reading it more carefully may help toward more constructive perspective. Why go off on coal which I consider it to be never clean and never will be clean energy. To push for nuclear energy as the other clean alternative to solar simply because newer technology is supposedy so foolproof is based on arrogance. I have seen children affected by Chernobyl disaster and there isn't really a word to describe the tragedy. If nuclear energy is so safe and is the answer to meet the ever growing energy demands of the world according to your opinion,do you see a safer world filled with more nuclear power plants ? I don't think so. When your eyes ever beheld breathtaking beauties given by Nature,you start to realize we also have responsibility not to abuse but to use resources that are least harmful to nature and humankind.

Exploit Chernobyl victims all you want, Anonymous. But all you do is evidence ignorance of the range of what "nuclear power" means & why no one else used Russian RBMK reactors. And you exploit an ability to fib to yourself & others about the reality of nuclear power's safety -- far exceeding all alternatives for over 50 years.

You do more damage, as does Bill, with unfounded opinions, than others could hope to do.

Does anyone believe nuclear is so safe that Chernobyl should be reopened?

Why?

Chernobyl never should have been opened. Why not learn something about why the rest of the world never used RBMK reactors?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK

Why ask such an ill-informed question before studying at least a little? Do you respond to 'straw man' arguments positively yourself?

Just as Fukushima was improperly built & managed, Chernobyl was also. It just happened to be run even more poorly -- almost as poorly as our PG&E runs gas lines -- remember?

They, miraculously, take nukes more seriously than gas. And, their regulator -- NRC -- isn't quite the pushover our CPUC is, with its former utility exwecs on board.

Also, there's no place in Calif. without faults. And, just as we do when choosing a home or a car, we look everything over. Faults in Calif. are mostly strike-slip, which means your house gets split in half, but not collapsed. Pacific, Indian Ocean, etc. deep faults are vertical (subduction), which is where real damage & tsunamis come from.

A reinforced reactor dome is like a ball on a wave, so won't collapse in a quake. The problem is that our water-cooled reactors need that cooling and should have been gone by 2000, just as JFK & Congress were advised 'only' 49 years ago... http://tinyurl.com/6xgpkfa

And, 34 years ago we cut funding for superior, non-meltdown, non-water, non-spent-fuel machines... http://ThoriumRemix.com

We invented 'em. We built & tested 'em. We then ignored 'em, until now -- the DoE has just completed their 5th meeting giving them to China...
www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/01/china_thorium_bet/
www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

The Chinese will likely be selling our development work back to us and the rest of the world, yet again. Balance of Payments? What Balance of Payments?

Who cares that we could have licked global warming & emissions over a decade ago, while making $ and fresh water all over the world?

The price of political ignorance is big. Perhaps fatally big.