Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used(atlasobscura.com) |
Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant: Finished in 1978 but never used(atlasobscura.com) |
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNR-300
Another related timing coincidence is that a smaller sodium-cooled reactor in the USA (the EBR-2) demonstrated completely passive shutdown in loss of flow and loss of heat sink accidents without any control rods going in just 2 weeks before Chernobyl happened. Of course today almost no one has heard of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Breeder_Reactor_I...
If you read the timeline, you can see that the protests started before the Chernobyl disaster. At that point, no government entity wanted the reactor to go online.
Some of my family members went to protest there when they were younger. Our physics teachers discussed the plant with us on several occasions as part of the mandatory curriculum. I can just say, Germany's relationship to nuclear is and was always characterized by strange concerns about environmental issues and a drive just to oppose something for vague political associations. It's hard to describe, but feels very similar to virtue signaling.
Another thing that is often forgotten and at least partially contributed to the outcome of Kalkar never going online, is a substantial change in the political climate regarding the question of nuclear proliferation.
It might seem strange now, but 40 years after WW II Germany was probably closer to getting its own nuclear inventory than today. While it was far from uncontroversial at the time it was not a heretic idea either and widely discussed.
A fast breeder like Kalkar would have been an important step in that direction, as would have been the heavy-water reactor in Niederaichbach, which only ran for about a year.
To complete the nuclear fuel cycle and to produce the plutonium for Kalkar a reprocessing plant would have been necessary which again had enabled Germany to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. The planned and partially completed facilities in Wackersdorf were abandoned in the 80s too.
Chernobyl happened 1986 and probably put the last nail in the coffin, when its radioactive material spilled over Germany and people were recommended to stop eating mushrooms, game animals and homegrown salad. I was doing my nuclear physics practical at the Uni at the time and our lab offered food measurements as a public service, so people brought their homegrown vegetables, fruits and milk. Highest measurements were always the grass in front of the institute though. Much higher than in the "neutron lab" I was working in at the time.
1991 Kalkar was finally officially abandoned and later sold to a private investor.
But contrary to Zwentendorf and Kalkar the project was rebooted (in several attempts) and is currently scheduled to be finished in 2028.
The early nuclear power plants were all individually designed and custom built, before commercial power plants were standardized. The German standard plants are called Konvoi and the individual builds Pre-Konvoi.
Currently Angra II is the only Pre-Konvoi plant still in operation in the whole world. If Angra III goes online, it will be a quarter of a century after the last Pre-Konvoi plant (Angra II) and more than half a century after all the others.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_build...
I'm highly skeptical of the schedules and since it's so old equipment I would be very surprised if it will be in budget and start when scheduled. Anyway I hope it works out.
It's not like it was a one-time chance that we missed, and we'll never get back. The technology still exists, it is even in production. Russia has 2 reactors running as of now, BN-600 and BN-800. The first has been running for more than 4 decades, the other for 8 years. A BN-1200 design has been recently approved for construction, and Russia plans to make many of them.
In the US, there's the Terrapower company that has started the approval process with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its sodium-cooled reactor, Natrium [2]. These things take years, but my guess is that in the worst case scenario, they'll still be able to build a reactor by 2040.
[1] https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/BN-1200-plans-for-Be...
It's a great place to sleep in for EDM festivals like Parookaville. And the nuclear reactor aesthetic certainly goes well with steampunk stage decoration.
Additionally Zwentendorf is/was used for training for crews of same-type reactors.
Btw. there is nothing really renewable in solar planels and wind mills.
"When wind turbine blades reach the end of their 20-to-25-year service lives, they usually end up in landfills."
https://cen.acs.org/environment/recycling/companies-recycle-...
"Are Solar Panels Hazardous Waste?
Hazardous waste testing on solar panels in the marketplace has indicated that different varieties of solar panels have different metals present in the semiconductor and solder. Some of these metals, like lead and cadmium, are harmful to human health and the environment at high levels. If these metals are present in high enough quantities in the solar panels, solar panel waste could be a hazardous waste under RCRA. Some solar panels are considered hazardous waste, and some are not, even within the same model and manufacturer. Homeowners with solar panels on their houses should contact their state/local recycling agencies for more information on disposal/recycling."
https://www.epa.gov/hw/end-life-solar-panels-regulations-and...
Renewable is about fuel, not generator.
If gas station turbine is compared to solar panel and windmill blade, then natural gas and underground oil are compared to sunlight and wind.
Underground oil and gas are limited resources baked many many millions of years ago, pretty much over similar timescales.
Wind and sunlight,for the purpose of this discussion, are self renewing - we will not run out of them.
Your discussion is more on how ecological the actual generators are, and that's a fair discussion to have, but comparison is not a wind mill blade and a car, it's windmill blade and solar panel to nuclear reactors and gas power plants.
Turbine blades are mostly fiberglass, which is about as neutral of a material as you can get. They are buried in a landfill (worstcase) after producing tremendous amounts of energy. New designs are lasting longer and being made recyclable, since so many people have this sticking point (even though no fuel oil is recyclable)
Austria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_Nuclear_Power_Plant
Built and powered up, but never used..
"...the state taking over the plant and then attaching a 3 percent surcharge to Long Island electric bills for 30 years to pay off the $6 billion price tag"
"Had the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station gone into operation as planned, it would have prevented the emission of an estimated three million tons of carbon dioxide per year"
> LILCO's problems were compounded by NRC rules in the wake of Three Mile Island, requiring that operators of nuclear plants work out evacuation plans in cooperation with state and local governments. This prompted local politicians to join the growing opposition to the plant. Since any land evacuation off the island would involve traveling at least 60 miles (97 km) back through New York City to reach its bridges, local officials feared that the island could not be safely evacuated.[3]
There are currently 1.5M people in Suffolk County today, and millions more in adjoining areas. If that were a peacetime evacuation that would be one of the largest in history.
Normally nuclear accidents lead to a much more significant destruction of property value, vs. actual loss of life- but on Long Island?
Forgetting that for a moment: Fukushima cleanup is estimated to cost $470 to $660 billion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup). Just the aggregate single family home total property value (Suffolk and Nassau) is something like $650 billion (median times number of homes- I'm sure this is a massive underestimate considering the mansions on the Gold Coast and the Hamptons).
Existing insurance is not enough:
https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/n...
I wish they had turned it on instead of building a huge coal (now russian gas) power plant nearby.
nice articles ... but - there is always a but ;))
yes, part of it was the "anti-nuclear sentiment" ... but i would say, only a smaller part.
the "real" reason was internal austrian politics.
you have to know the background: during the 1970ties a left-leaning socialist government propelled the country into the future - implemented a large package of reforms -, after decades of societal backlash & stagnation following the 2nd world-war and at first only marginal influence of the late 60ties and early 70ties worldwide students protests etc.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Kreisky
so after zwentendorf was build chancellor kreisky throw all of his popular weight behind it and did something remarkable (i would say: stupid): he said, if the popular vote ends against zwentendorf, he will resign => the liberal-conservative austrian peoples party saw the light to get rid of him and invested heavily into this ... the rest is history...
just my 0.02€
If noone ever fought for the environment beyond their own personal immediate health we might be in better position now than we are in term of CO2 and millions of people and thousands of ecosystems and species could be saved.
It is astonishing how far the nuclear bubble is ready to go down the stairs of reason for drama. I mean seriously? Wtf is this? :D Are you joking? This is the equivalent of people who buy a gun to protect their house because the police is useless and being proud of it.
Its also really expensive because you need all the infrastructure for nuclear plus the infrastructure for steam turbines which all needs to be built and maintained and is very expensive
Three paragraphs seem to convey the same message "they built it, the public said no, so it never got switched on".
> Completed in mid-to-late 1970s, the plant in Zwentendorf cost around a billion euro to complete.
This sentence begins and ends with basically the same word. Feels like a highschooler level writing...
Austria, just like many other European countries, are connected to a single grid which has all kinds of energies and where everybody buys on the European Energy Exchange.
This grid is what makes the rapid transition to renewable energies possible, and which shows that the base load scare is not more than just one of many FUD tools which aim at slowing down or stopping a transition which is already there in full force.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/10/...
No, it makes it possible to have nuclear base load plants in Hungary and Bulgaria and few other countries while some small country can play the renewable game at home. Renewables are not something that we can control. This makes them useless without a giant battery or power plants that are possible to scale up and down. The irony is that these power plants are usually gas turbines.
Even something like https://ndb.technology/ has a more serious vision for our energy future, much more serious than the usual we do not need base load just put a solar panel on everything movement largely driven by clueless politicians.
This billion-euro nuclear reactor was never switched on
Also AFAIK it isn't really complete anymore as parts have been dismantled and sold to be used in reactors of similar vintage.
And while Fukushima and Zwentendorf had the same type of reactor (Boiling Water Reactor), it was not the same modell or from the same vendor. Fukushimas reactor was made by General Electrics. Zwentendorfs reactor was made by the German Kraftwerk Union.
Also fun fact: The plant is still producing energy but with Solar panels since they plastered the whole yard and the roof of the plant
Correlated: SVT did a concert in one[1][2].
[1] - https://www.svtplay.se/video/e56v35j/radiokoren-i-reaktorhal...
[2] - https://youtu.be/Q560cKnreSk
Edit: Added Trailer
How much of the anti-nuclear movement in the West was actually a initiative of the USSR?
The operator of the plant assumed that the politicians would get to their senses at some point and kept it in operational shape for some years even though it wasn’t producing any power. Then they went bankrupt because pretend-running a nuclear plant is expensive.
I didn't know this part of the story! Sounds very much like the ÖVP indeed...
Can you be a bit more precise with your 2 cents so we can actually understand what you're saying?
Social Democracy isn't "socialist left", but leaving that aside, what you're saying is that the social democrats of the time tried to create energy independence(opposite of today's social democrats by the way), that's smart. So the Austrian people's party invested into what exactly? What did they do?
I see that he was in the Willy Brandt camp who was famous for his Ostpolitik, interesting. I just learned through the links that while he was working on normalizing ties to the east, he worked at the same time on anticommunist policies, which is also interesting.
If I get what you're saying correctly then this reminds me of when the plan for Fiber optic development in Germany was sacked to create copper to indoctrinate people with cable TV. It was in the same time frame actually.
https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
(I'm just trying to explain the concept, I have absolutely no idea about Austrian politics. Other than the commonly known fact that they're currently not energy independent)
ok ... lmgtfu ...
so lets go for the details - sadly most of it is in german
public vote on zwentendorf ~ where you can read the details i mentioned - and more:
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksabstimmung_in_%C3%96sterr...
an overview about the reforms of the kreisky government during the 70ties
* http://kreisky100.at/meilensteine/index.html
or about the person "bruno kreisky"
* https://kontrast.at/bruno-kreisky-biografie/
very essential for the people were social and work related reforms, education (hertha firnberg) and women-politics (johanna dohnal)
ad johanna dohnal - a really remarkable person, on-off part of austrian governmental politics from the 70ties to the 90ties ... the english wikipedia page is sadly pretty empty:
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Dohnal
hertha firnberg - another remarkable women in the austrian politics of the 70ties: in short, she made the (higher) austrian educational system available to people w/o a lot (!) of money (higher education schools and universities, which where very elite prior to her reforms)
* https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hertha_Firnberg
the english wikipedia page about her is better than johanna dohnals, but the german version is still more extensive ...
ad parties:
the SPOe back in the 70ties was still a socialistic party - i think they already dropped the revolutionary aspect of socialism back then ...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Democratic_Party_of_Aus...
the OeVP back then was a "very open to the right", bourgeoise - in its negative connotation - party whose primary "clientel" was - and still is - (very) religious people (christian-catholic), larger companies and rich people.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_People%27s_Party
afaik. it was planned to get the powerplant zwentendorf into operation at a later stage in time, but the famous accident in tschernobyl killed off all those plans by the 2nd half of the 1980ties.
which finally led to the building of the powerplant "Duernrohr"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BCrnrohr_Power_Station
yet another 0.02€
Even a very varied grid (solar, wind, offshore wind and tidal) could struggle with e.g. a big storm. E.g. last summer a big part of norther Germany was hit by a storm with very strong winds, which made solar and wind stop generating power reliably over around a week. There was the rest of Germany plus the neighbours (including France's nuclear) to compensate.. but if it coincides with something else, like France being hit with a heat wave lowering rivers' level and increasing their temperature, forcing the shutdown of nuclear reactors, things can get complicated.
NPPs can do load following: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant#N...
Of course if we don't care about the climate gas and coal plants are cheaper (assuming cheap gas and cheap coal)
Gas also becomes obsolete with peaking-capable renewables with battery and/or PES.
Not sure how to simultaneously maximise the three metrics. How many tonnes of CO2 is equal to one life or 1M USD?
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/impacts-of-energy-sourc...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-e...
Emperor Nero invested millions of man-hours into the Corinth Canal, but that did at least eventually get some use a mere 1,800 years later.
That's why some countries gain and then lose interest in nuclear power as well - e.g. Poland has recently and suddenly gained interest in it because of Russia.
To start, the sellers of the project will be pressed to embellish the history and real capabilities of the system.
And mega-projects are a magneto for corruption. Part of the money will vanish, then somebody will typically hide it, cutting corners in safety, and then some horrified official looks at it and thinks: "No way I will sign the green light and associate my name with this mess".
This is a dilemma. Politicians can't never, ever admit that this never worked (and millions were burnt by their naivety). "best thing since chocolate with grapes, but can't be opened and will never be" is a common defense. Plus <blame deflected to outer group like hippies or public> for better measure.
I'm not saying that this is the case here, but it just happens a lot with mega projects and, lets face it, companies working on nuclear projects were all except honest or transparent with the public on those years
Those reactors play a negligible role. We've seen it all when the rotting French fleet went down for months.
Nuclear was the smallest part in the mix in 2020. This is 4 years any additional percentage of renewables ago: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/EU-energy-mix-2020-12_fi...
> This makes them useless without a giant battery or power plants
How are you still repeating this myth? We have the whole of Austria or the Nordics as giant batteries. The grid is working now. Despite the constantly rising amounts of really clean energy in it, and despite the FUD from the nuclear bubble.
Fukushima's BWRs were GE, Hitachi, and Toshiba. It doesn't matter who the official brand is on the side because they're integrated and supported on-site using consulting companies who probably designed them and probably worked for both or all 3 companies at some point.
Sorry, not entirely correct: https://www.westinghousenuclear.com/nuclear-fuel/boiling-wat...
I worked for the company of one the main guys who designed BWR-4, consulted on BWRs, came up with SBWR (never used) and ABWR, and submitted ALWR plans to EPRI that never really went anywhere because of public relations and regulatory climate. ALWR became the basis of some SMRs like NuScale. WH and GE Hitachi SMRs are BWRs.
sed s/SVT/PBS/g se_SE > en_US> Gas has no good alternative all grids need some gas right now
Batteries are good peaked plant replacements.
Even in my physics class in high school, when we spoke about the reactor in Kalkar and watched several documentaries about Chernobyl, our teachers made it seem like explosions from nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons would be the same in yield. Which is an outright lie, given a nuclear reactor usually explodes from a steam or hydrogen explosion.
Also, I found this [0] post with lots of pictures [1] from the Technical University of Graz about a visit, and the pictures give a good taste of what you might see there.
btw, if you come to pass Austria (Vienna or rural Upper Austria) and want to grab a beer or something let me know - seems like we are both working as engineering managers and share some interests, might be interesting :)
[0] https://www.tugraz.at/institute/iee/news-events/article/fueh... [1] https://www.tugraz.at/institute/iee/bildergalerien/2019-07-1...
Just a point about the socialist label for the many Americans here. Willie Brandt worked hard on what was called social market economy, it is actually what gave rise to the successes of the German state in the past. While it is socialist, it is very far away from what the average American likes to call socialist. It was a hugely successful economic model, and the bit by bit destruction of that system is what gave rise to this dysfunctional rump state, which is the current Germany.
I don't think we have a full account of the cost of the chemicals involved in semi-conductor construction.
I know its an inconvenient fact....
We all want to hate nuclear power but have no good storage plans for these new variable green power sources.
Nuclear may take a long time to spin up but it is constant and reliable.
Electrify the economy they say....
They forget wind and solar are part time producers.
There were many examples where dams weren't built to protect local ecosystems. Pumped storage denied. Roads not build that could shorten the travel. Ethanol in fuel that actually emitted more CO2 because of land use change to satisfy the enforced demand. Multi-use bags that require so much energy and resources to build that you need to use them thousand times to get even with single use ones. Paper bags that require more energy and resources to produce which decay or burn releasing CO2. Plug-in hybrids that barely anyone charges that are hauling useless heavy batteries while burning more gasoline. Whole recycling scam mascarading as a solution. All these dumb specific interventions that backfire.
The only thing that comes to my mind that actually improved situation was the global ban on fluorocarbons.
We were super lucky in the case of ozone layer.
Which is a bit more tangable.
https://www.bfs.de/SharedDocs/Bilder/BfS/DE/ion/notfallschut...
The mushroom thing is because of bioaccumulation: Mushrooms seem to ingest the particles from its surrounding ground/ground water, hence a higher concentration of radioactive material in a smaller volume. And then wild boars eat those mushrooms, concentrating it even further. Caesium 137 has a rather short half life of only 30 years, but through the process of accumulation/concentration still today meat from wild boars shot in that region gets tested and is often over the allowable limit to eat.
Because the contamination varies greatly, depending on where it rained during a short timespan in 1986, the amount of usable meat also varies, but is usually between 50% and 70%. The rest, which is not safe to eat is bought by the state.[1]
People are always quick to call Germans crazy because of their attitude towards nuclear energy, but Chernobyl had real world implications to our daily lives and to a degree still has to this day.
[1] https://www.jagd-bayern.de/jagd-wild-wald/jagdpraxis/rcm-mes...
This is, to some extent, the same as Hinkley Point C where EDF and CGN have got a long term strike price. I wait with interest to see how Sizewell C will be financed, be it the regulated asset base model or else a Contract For Difference.
There is a good argument for cost-plus construction contracts provided the purchaser can financially cope with the risks. Risk transfer is never free!
Indeed. That would be French taxpayers.
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Agreement-on-pos...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40331523
People from the anglosphere often seem to think that Russian and now Qatari gas is a replacement for the nuclear power, which is rather wrong: The vast majority of Germany's natural gas usage is residential for heating and in industry.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/energy-st...
Gas is hard to replace ad hoc with electricity because you'd have to replace boilers in millions of homes and apartments, a multi-decade infrastructure project.
The best time to start a multi-decade infrastructure project was multiple decades ago. The second best time is now.
Boilers need replacing anyways, so this could have been very gracefully over time.
Not only would a (West) Germany with abundant cheap nuclear power have energy to compete industrially, they would have the ability to enrich plutonium which might lead to the development of a home-grown nuclear strike capacity within a short range from Moscow. That is, assuming such an idea was politically possible.
All energy is fungible. Certainly the cost of switching is not free, but the time to begin doing that was decades ago.
E.g. Greenpeace Germany had weirdly close links to Gazprom, and was even at one point selling natural gas as "green" and "renewable". Greenpeace Belgium was lobbying for the closing of nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas ones. I find it hard to believe that even Greenpeace could be that blind without external help.
I think the timeline matters here. While the effect of CO2 emission on global warming are known (to some extent) for more than a century already, in the eighties and early nineties, it was not a chief concern of the general populace in Europe, while the (perceived or actual) dangers of nuclear energy certainly was.
If it managed to get into the curriculum of a small post-communist country in the mid-1990s, "green" organisations should have been aware of the impacts of emissions and CO2. And for what it's worth, Greenpeace up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine made it infeasible, was pushing for closing of actively running and already amortised nuclear power plants and replacing them with gas.
It's hilariously ironic how one of the most iconic green movements actually ended up causing more damage to the planet on the planetary scale than helping. Sucks for us all that have to live with it though, just because a bunch of blind idiots couldn't be bothered to think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia_in_the_European_energy_...
But who knows. This was 15 years after the end of WW2. It wouldn't be too surprising if there had been lingering fears in Russia about what Germany might be up to outside of NATO.
They rely on the grid. Just like the rest of the connected countries. Just like nuclear country France does.
What kind of energy is cheap at the moment there is irrelevant. If nuclear energy would be turned off on the grid, like it happens all the time when the French fleet needs repairs again for example, no lights go out in Austria. Just like no lights go out in France.
What you do is the same thing as making fun of humans because they rely on supermarkets and don't go out on the streets and shoot some animals.
Times change.
This is why it never happened again.
Learning from mistakes is something good.
It happened a single time in 40 years and the European grid almost died so no, they do rely on nuclear whether they are happy or not.
Do you have any trustworthy sources for that?
The one time this happened in 40 years was quite a problem for European supply reliability.
Germany only followed after their Wackersdorf debacle, matching Tschnernobyl, and then finally Fukushima.
The rest of Europe is still in the hands of the energy lobbies.
And Austria does not rely on nuclear at all. It's rather the other way round, that all the others rely on Austria (and Swiss) expensive peak energy from their high mountains. When Europe turns on all it's power switches at the very same time the grid would collapse without Austria.
[0] https://w3.windmesse.de/windenergie/pm/46044-ig-windkraft-at...
Zwentendorf of the very same size cannot be turned on again fortunately. The meltdown and earthquake risk with all the insecure Russian reactors around is of course still around.
Would you happen to have a source?
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/we-...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01228-5
https://cepa.org/article/russias-civil-nuclear-threat-must-b...
Quote from your article:
> With the exception of Hungary, which has recently signed an agreement with Rosatom for the expansion of its Paks nuclear power plant, European countries have been seeking to diversify away from the company since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Is nuclear energy a European energy source, or how is this comment related?
> the European grid almost died so no, they do rely on nuclear whether they are happy or not.
It is actually the opposite of it. I mean seriously: what? :D
> In 2022, the power system proved resilient in the face of the most serious energy crisis since the 1970s
> I am not honest enough to avoid making strawmen
A-ha!
