“P.S. We also don’t eat cats and dogs,” Berlin’s foreign ministry taunts Republican presidential candidate.
Germany’s foreign ministry hit back Wednesday at former U.S. President Donald Trump after he criticized the country’s energy policy at the presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump slammed Germany in his closing remarks, claiming Berlin regretted its decision to transition to renewable energy.
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But the German foreign ministry took umbrage at that, blasting Trump in an unusually blunt statement on social media.
“Like it or not: Germany’s energy system is fully operational, with more than 50 percent renewables,” the ministry wrote. “And we are shutting down — not building — coal and nuclear plants. Coal will be off the grid by 2038 at the latest.”
Where will you put the nuclear waste? Germany doesn’t even have the concept of a plan where to put theirs, they are currently keeping it
a) in a corroding salt mine, that is currently leaking water and will poison the entire area’s ground water within 20 years, so it’ll have to be dug up again, which will cost many billions b) in above ground ‘temporary’ holding facilities c) shipping it off to other countries
None of this is sustainable. Until the waste problem is solved, we shouldn’t even think about building out nuclear.
It has already been solved, and a search should tell you all about it.
I’m still on mobile, so sharing links is still a pain, but a few key things:
Nuclear waste is produced quite slowly, so whatever cost you associate with storage is over a large period of time; we have the technology to build centrals that can use that waste to produce more energy, reducing waste even further.
No, it’s not. There are ways to recycle parts of the fuel rods, true, but not the thousands of tons of contaminated material that inevitably gather during operations and end-of-life of a reactor. You don’t honestly think that the only dangerous waste are spend fuel rods?
And yes, the very problem is that storage needs to take place over geologic timescales. I can’t guarantee that our government will exist 20 years from now, much less 2000. Waste storage so far was managed so corruptly and incompetently that it is already failing after 50 years. Forgive me if I have little faith whenever someone claims that they’ll just dig a hole and forget about it for a few millennia. The waste sites need maintenance, and if that ever ends might poison a region’s ground water in perpetuity.
The materials you mention are classified as “low level waste”, and they are “materials which contain small amounts of mostly short-lived radioactivity”, and they actually make up 94% of waste in the Uk, but according to this article, it’s 95%.
96% of spent nuclear fuel is Uranium, which can be reused.
Purely anecdotal; here’s a different anecdote.
Here’s is also a National Geographic article about this topic, and here is another.
Here is also the mortality rate of different sources of energy in 2012, and here it is in 2022. You’ll notice that after heavy R&D in renewables, nuclear is still the second safest; with all top three being really close, but hydro being a far 4th.
Please stop with the fear based, anti-scientific, rhetoric. I shouldn’t feel like I’m arguing with climate deniers or pro oilers when talking with supposed environmentalists. Which reminds of the reason why this is so important: renewables alone still can’t meet the energy demand without the assistance of fossil fuels, and the energy requirements keep rising:
“Clean sources of generation are set to cover all of the world’s additional electricity demand over the next three years” - they are accounting for nuclear, but nevertheless: “Low-emissions sources are expected to account for almost half of the world’s electricity generation by 2026”.
Almost half, by 2026, accounting for nuclear. And we are still getting warmer.