Phasing out Nuclear was a terrible choice and ironically disastrous for the environment.

I never understood how the Fukushima accident affected Germany. Are sixty foot tsunamis and M9.0 earthquakes a thing there? 9.

As a French person, I've had many discussions with Germans about nuclear energy in the past. I'm now wondering how much of our disagreement was due to each of us trusting different sources of information, yet both being confident in their credibility.

The changes claimed by Cicero were not there. Cicero claims that there was "no statement that a real extension of the operating life with new fuel rods for several years would be possible from a safety perspective." Firstly, there is no mention anywhere of the fact that an extension of the operating life for several years would be possible from a safety perspective. In neither of the two versions. That is wrong. Secondly, the paragraphs on long-term continued operation are still included in both documents.

The trouble with pressure groups is they focus on one issue and don't see the bigger picture. They also tend to create a dogma that they refuse to challenge when circumstances change or new evidence emerges.

"It is okay to change one's beliefs based on new evidence."

Here, in Spain, our government wants to do the same thing. The funny thing is the the same minister that told Spanish that nuclear power should be removed from Spain is now in central European Bank and she's saying that Europe needs to go for nuclear power. This change of opinion happened to be in one week or a little bit more

2:12 "Industry pressure then had them postpone the shut-down" is quite the framing. The government decided to extend the usage. That's what happened.

For a while there, I thought you were talking about Sweden. Political parties and individual politicians responsible for closing 6 of our 12 reactors refuse to take...responsibility. We are many who remember what happened...

As Germany foreign affairs minister say "You need to change your policies 360° " 😂😂😂

As a Japanese guy who works in nuclear energy industry, and does so alongside engineers from Germany, I am not at all surprised by this. No politician seems to be able to keep their political ideologies (unrelated to energy) out of the picture when discussing nuclear energy. What a shame.

I highly recommend watching the latest Markus Lanz episode where Habeck directly explains what contributed to this decision making process. It may not suit some people's opinion, but it might make you question the "scandal" tag from this video's title.

Never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by corruption when it comes to politicians and their advisors.

Churchill famously quipped that you can trust America to do the right thing - after having exhausted all the alternatives. Germany is still exhausting alternatives.

There is an important sentence at the screenshot at 2:49: "Ob längerfristig ein unterbrechungsfreier Betrieb erfolgen kann, ist ohne Klärung unter Beteiligung der Betreiber, Hersteller und Landesaufsichtsbehörden sowie deren Gutachtern nicht zu beantworten" - "Whether uninterrupted operation can take place in the long term cannot be answered without clarification involving the operators, manufacturers and state supervisory authorities as well as their experts". This question had not been answered at the time as the paper listing optional ways to continue operations was written. So we do not know yet what those experts have said, but we know that the enterprises operating the nuclear power plant where not very happy with the decision of chancellor Scholz to disregard the warning in the final version of the paper and to extend the operation of the nuclear plants beyond the scheduled date of Dec 31, 2022 by 3 months. (Their unhappiness had mostly economic reasons, however.) New (or refurbished) fuel rods would have to be bought from Russia, by the way, the same way as France does to this day ...

I have several technical tops against the continuation: - As you mentioned the safety checks were postponed. IMHO doing all the necessary checks would take at least a year PLUS all the flaws that the checks unveil have to be repaired (OK as you mentioned, then new fuel would have been on site). - The 3 sites are quite old. They should have had continuous updates through the years. This is all missing. - These remaining 3 plants do not make a lot in our consumption. 6% power (at their peak power) seems more a part of daily changes. - Today German /Europe electricity is much more complicated. For me the most critical point is to manage the grid in more intelligent ways than before. This for me is still missing. - What 2023 missing most was "regulative power" - the quick response to shorts. But nuclear power is traditional continuous power.

What about staff? If your country decides to shut down nuclear power, it would be reasonable to assume that skilled staff start to leave and reskill.

Here in the UK the hot air generated in parliament is re used to heat kew gardens. 🤭🤭🤭

It's like phasing out chemotherapy and not cigarettes

3:00 this was not simply a rewrite. It was an added conclusion based on new information at a later date. The conditions that were previously defined as necessary for a safe continuation (the timely procurement of fuel rods and coordination with the security agencies and operators) had not been met. Therefore, the logical conclusion was that a safe continuation could not be guaranteed. That conclusion was also not the only argument and was not directly translated into policy. The reactors did get a brief extension to make use of the remaining fuel.

It does appear to be a remarkably stupid idea to close down existing power sources before there are new power sources available to replace them.

The tragedy of us in Germany is to ruminate. A country of Siemens, Linde, countless inventors and great scientists is paralized. No batteries but Diesel, no storage systems, no heat pumps, no suitable grid. It is like the Romantic followed the Enlightenment. We should be deeply worried.

Nice to see a scientist calling out the duplicity of politicians.

About 150 years ago, my state’s legislature tried to legislate the value of pi. Fortunately, one of them was a mathematician and was able to convince them that it was a bad idea.

Proper decision making needs reliable data reporting. Without it it's all headless chickens running around. This is the sort of thing that needs prison time... It undermines everything.

Is "installed capacity" the rated capacity of the wind turbines?

The real question here is not science but the abillity to judge what is scientifice, opinion and desire. That is where the debate should have been about. Not only todays politicians fail in that, but society itself as well. Too much has been dominated by people who consider dogma as being right. We need to talk about this.

4:43 "for example we pretty much all heat with oil and gas here" Oil is actually rather used for transportation than for heating. Gas though, is mostly used as heating. Well technically combustion engines run on heat generated by burning oil, but we are nitpicking here.

Idiotic removing nuclear stable power in countries that lie on relatively stable ground, like in Scandinavia. No big eartquakes, no tsunamis, no wars, no hurricanes or twisters. It should be expanded here instead. More nuclear power to give the world electricity enough for electric cars, trucks, ai, iot aso.

Replace Nuclear with Hot Air and Lies, as there's usually an abundance of both. 🤪

This video seems to me a badly researched weird framing of what happened. Taking Cicero's (quite criticisable) text as-is and ironically "citing" "The ministry is denying that anything weird ever happened" makes it look like something shady has happened, while the processes are just being part of the normal political process. It might be, that nuclear energy is a rather attractive energy source on paper, but it is questionable if it's really economically sensible right now after the nuclear exit is done when it has always relied on subsidies. (Besides that - having a 5000 year old civilization producing deadly garbage for the generations of hundreds of thousands of years to come seems just plain foolish.) Sorry man, but seeing this un-thought-out clickbait type of stuff on the internet only gives the idiots that have been trolling against the ones that really want to make a change more ammunition. The greens are the only party in germany that actually have a chance in reaching climate change goals imo and get irrationally trolled into oblivion by spread of misinformation and just plain-out lies.

This situation is genuinely crazy

However they managed to do this, it's one of the all time dumbest decisions.

I wonder what these safety requirements are that Germans are quoting but so many other countries are not quantifying. I get that it could simply be a yes or no decision based on enormity of risk. That this happened when the German prime minister was a PhD in QM makes me really wonder what was going on in Germany.

There have been a few research papers done by international teams on future world wide energy requirements and they look bleak, even if everyone goes to nuclear power. Perhaps you can do a video on that.

I mean I understand some concerns with nuclear but it isnt justify getting rid of nuclear and opting for carving out a full mountain to get lowest quality coal just to keep lights turned on.

Once nuclear power became politicized, that was the end of any rational public discourse.

It's odd there's a scandal of a phase-out, usually it's the other way lol.

Actually, knowing the difference between solid scientific knowledge, and so-called scientific knowledge that is not so solid, is what matters now more than ever before.

No matter which nation it is,politicians seem to be incompetent or corrupt or both.

I´m busy dusting, but it´s only a few qm, just enough electric power for my own little household. Thank you for a balanced and realistic report. I like to add, that the beginning of the end of nuclear power in Germany was allready in the early 90s, cause they closed the nuclear industry (in Hanau) and the fast breed reactor (in Kalkar), that was ready for the grid never was used. So the dependence to the neighbour country France began.

Thank you for sharing. You are right on track. Everyone stay safe, warm, happy,dry and healthy. From Henrico County Virginia

Didn't Ciceros article get debunked? Volksverpetzer found things not adding up or something like that.

It would be cool to see a deeper dive in price of energy vs cost of energy. There are complex market phenomena that make the energy produced by renewables in germany particularly pricy.

04:00 the blades of those wind turbines appear to rotate in the wrong direction

It's so simple. Nuclear is fascinating, yes, I get that. Been in the inner part of ITER - impressive. Yet, why taking the risk when simple clean energy is clearly cheaper? There is a vast, vaaast area of unused roof space that can be used to generate clean, cheap and most importantly decentralised energy. Nuclear can not beat that, even disregarding the intrinsic risk. EVs can be used to buffer on cloudy / no wind days. This time you got it completely wrong Sabine.

The installed capacity versus energy production is quite striking for the renewables. As Peter Zeihan says, its not particularly sunny or windy in Germany.

4:49 To be fair, even in that graph nuclear is smaller than renewable, even in 2011 when the Fukushima accident happened.

Yesterday (26.4.2024) there was a Bundestag debate (20/11145) about if nuclear power was a viable option for the future. In his speech, Robin Mesarosch (SPD) described a scenario if Germany really tried to reinstate nuclear power as a primary energy source: There were many major roadblocks such as missing qualified staff, no one wanting to invest, no available insurances, fuel rods mostly just from Russia, and it thus of course being far more expensive than renewable sources.

Politicians never want to admit they were wrong or admit they made a mistake. They won't get reelected if they did.

I think there are some issues with running fuel rods longer than their design life. Yes, it can be done, but I think the longer used rods become unrecyclable or a more difficult disposal problem. Something about the different mix of radioactive byproducts after extended use. Not sure if the problems are practical or just economic.

Sabine, I feel with every video, there is some key information missing. About the "trap" statement: since the current government is a very different one that brought up the end of nuclear power, it is currently in opposition and actually proposing to keep nuclear power up. Which is weird to me, but should be worth noting. The second thing is, that the whole discussion from a German perspective is not limited to German power supply. In fact the whole discussion includes possibilities to import power from other countries and it is accepted, that this implies using nuclear power since these decision are taken already and won't changen these countries. So why building again even more of these than necessary just to produce an inner-european oversupply? Alternative supplies for heating are for example geo-thermal sources and mostly decentralized options including the reduction of demand.

I used to be very active in an environmentalist youth organization here in Norway in my teenage years. Most of the stuff we focused on was stopping the expansion of the Norwegian oil fields, and the improvement of railways over car traffic. But whenever I visited the central office for the organization I'd see these old "Nuclear? No thanks!" buttons and posters laying around. Already back then, when I was young and naive and tended to go along with the opinions of those around me, the animosity towards nuclear power struck me as strange. Europe depends on Norwegian oil and gas - if we take that away, what were they hoping to use in order to meet the growing energy demands? Solar, wind, wave and tidal, traditional hydro power... We had the data for all of those things, how much energy those sources could deliver. Printed in our magazine every other month or so. It didn't add up. There was - and still is - literally no way to meet our energy needs solely with completely renewable sources. Even if they were built non-stop with fanatical fervour across the continent, the energy demands would soon catch up and exceed what completely renewable power could deliver. There were lots of smart people in that organization, they must have been able to crunch those numbers. Yet, there was no push to change the strict stance on nuclear. Perhaps it was that trap you mentioned - not wanting to admit that they had been on the wrong track for so long. Ignoring the data in favour of the agenda is just par for the course.

Not all fuel rods can be used safely past their date. It depends on whether the fission products create cracks in the rods. Fission products can be a larger volume vs the original. If these cracks allow water to leak inside & boil it could shatter or explode the rod. The contents may settle to the reactor bottom, get in pipes, and create a real problem. It sounds like these rods were ok, but that's not true of fuel rods in general.

In Finland we have alot of wind power and electricity is cheap, except when it doesnt wind. Then its really expensive. Curiously in never winds when its -30C outside and we are all turning up our electric heaters…

Sabine's translation is wrong in a subtle way which really misrepresents the document version 2 in my opinion. First Version 1 did not claim it was possible to continue the operation from a safety perspective, neither short term nor long term. For short term it sais on page 2-3: "Die Betreiber der deutschen Kernkraftwerke werden gebeten zu prüfen, inwieweit ein Weiterbetrieb mit vorhanden Brennelementen unter Einhaltung der notwendigen Sicherheit, möglich wäre". Which means that the department will ask the operating companies whether it's possible to continue operation short term. In other words: they don't know yet. For long term it sais: "Hinsichtlich der Bewertung der Ermüdung von mechanischen Einrichtungen [...]. Diese Entscheidungen und deren Auswirkungen müssten bei einem geplanten Weiterbetrieb erneut sicherheitstechnisch bewertet werden.". Which means for long term operation someone would have to check whether or not it's safe. In other words: they don't know yet. Version 2 surely is more opposed to continued operation and cleary recommends against it, but it doesn't say it's impossible. I don't like Sabine's translation. In my opinion it really changes the meaning and is thus just wrong. The document does not say that postponing the shutdown is not compatible with safety regulations. It actually sais that postponing the shutdown is not justifiable and in the conclusion sais it is not justifiable because the information they have is not clear enough and in doubt the decision should place safety first (on page 5 of version 2): "[...] Ausmaß ist aufgrund der nicht präzise ermittelbaren beitragenden Faktoren nicht quantifizierbar. [...] muss die Entscheidung im Zweifel für die Sicherheit ausgehen."

But the nuclear way was a stupid one from the beginning. It was never cheap, it was just subsidised. And even if they change their minds again, a new reactor won't be online before the end of the next decade. So it absolutely does not make any sense to build new fission reactors.

Hopefully there's not lies going all the way back to more significant moments.

Isn't this typical? Technical people saying one thing and managers hearing and then spreading just the opposite just because that's what they want to hear ... So recognizable ...

4:22 You could had shown the actual production. The graph for this is on another page of the side you just visiting.

It has everything to do with so much undeserved vilification and unexplainable fear that stems from the vastly blown out of proportion "dangers" surrounding the energy source.

Doesn't Germany purchase nuclear power from France? Highly ironic and a funny policy workaround.

Same thing that happened in South Africa in the early 2000's a situation which has now crippled our economy due to energy insecurity

less than 20% of primary energy use is electricity generation. Heating, cooling, transport and industrial mfg ie cement, steel, ammonia, chemicals, plastics, paints and adhesives etc all use fossil. Fossil fuels have built in storage. Even if electricity is more efficient (for motors etc) there is no storage (except for pumped hydro, with batteries much lower down the list, flywheels, compressed air etc.)

How much is the rather non-fact-based anti nuclear feeling in Germany encouraged by the inclusion of Gudrun Pausewang's _Die Wolke_ in the school text-book canon? Some decisions about mental health here in New Zealand were shaped by the fact that _One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest_ replaced _The Catcher In The Rye_ as the approved novel for high school English (curriculum designers always wanting something that will really engage the kids, whilst not realising how out of date they are). It is, alas, easy to demonstrate the power of literature for ill; harder to show it as a force for good.

First, although I sometimes don't agree with you, I am always interested in your very well done videos. There are nowadays no problems with electricity supply, even without nuclear power plants. France has too much capacity installed since the 70s and, if you consider France and Germany as a whole, nuclear power has a very big part in the energy mix. Furthermore, this energy is purchased cheaper than if it would be produced by nuclear plants in Germany. The supply security for Germany cannot be seen as an only national issue, because Europe has a common grid and a free electricity market. The most secure electricity mix is done by a decentralized production system. Don't forget, a nuclear power plant can be a target for terrorists and in the worst case, a primary target for Wladimir Putin.

probably not Doc, with politicians it's usually a simple case of not listening and being generally obtuse in all things.

4:43 I don't heat with gas and oil but with electricity and so does one of my direct neighbors. And you can find some more heat pumps not so far away from my home. 4:56 More renewables

4:48 the total energy consumption chart looks really scary, only 1/5th is CO2 neutral and Germany is a rich country trying really hard to reduce CO2.

I put a good deal of the blame on Gudrun Pausewang and on our teachers that made the reading of her works mandatory in grade school.

A nice surprise would be if the experts manage to achieve stable fusion that works for a power-plant. I am sure it's still decades away though, even if they manage to do it in a lab.

We will not "replace" the fossil chunk at all. We will switch to heat pumps which will use only 20-30% of the energy to begin with.

They must have hired a guy from Volkswagen.

Good engineering is simple. If your engineering calculations state that X is required, a safety margin of at least 2X is designed and built. Fukushima was not a nuclear failure, it was an engineering failure by not removing the possibility that a possible tsunami in an earthquake zone could knock out the emergency generators. Ditto for Katrina, where the pumps were knocked out by lack of fuel to the emergency generators. Real world example is the requirement for 90 minutes of emergency lighting backup for many buildings, despite the fact that most people will exit a building way before the 90 minutes expire.

When times are easy wishful thinking is popular. When times start to get difficult reality bites hard.

It's a shame German engineering and production isn't being applied to the problem of providing nuclear power. It's the kind of industry that could be used to bolster the economy in the face of higher labor costs. (Lowering energy costs.) It takes a developed country with lots of research facilities to tackle this kind of problem. This could be a huge missed opportunity. Nuclear fission still has lots of untapped potential in terms of economic efficiency improvements.

They panicked about Fukishima, which was irrelevant to the DE power stations.

I have a simple question. According to relativity the mass of an object increases as it accelerates to near light speed. If you kept accelerating the object until its mass exceeds the gravitational collapse threshold would the object form a black hole?

There was NO WAY I could have foreseen this!

Well, Cicero making a mountain out of a maul hill comes at the time their preferred party, which in fact is very much a cause for this country not moving forward in any way in every single government it was part of, is fighting to get above 5%. It might be unscientific to consider this, but this is purely ideological and has minor relevance. And frankly, for a science commentator is a bit embarrassing to jump on their bandwagon without pointing that out. But then again, a scientists mind probably fails to grasp the cynical way the none-scientific world works, which is not nearly as free of intentions as what they are usually dealing with...

Sabine goes Parteipolitik. Ob das der richtige Weg ist? Von der zweifellos fundierten Erklärung von Wissenschaft und Kosmologie zu parteipolitisch gefärbten Schnellschüssen mit zweifelhafter Substanz. Das nerft.

I still think the best power source would be to utilize the nuclear energy of water heated to plasma state. Patented in Germany almost 30 years ago.

thank you for the video. as a german myself, i can only shake my head in disbelief when i look at the energy politics of our government

Does the Ministry not have a document management system? Even Google Docs has all the history of every document with who edited/added/wrote what, when, etc. The excuse of not knowing who edited it is pathetic

Justice? Will anything happen to the person, who I’m sure did not act alone, who altered the report? Even given the altered report, people should have known shutting done reliable nuclear power was akin to shooting oneself in the foot.

Will people ever learn you need a replacement energy source before phasing out your current one?

Their self-righteousness is greater than your need for reasonableness. They are, after all, saving the world. You know, the world... bless their little hearts!

Well no matter how this come about - I am happy that the nuclear power era is now coming to an end!

Haben Sie evtl. auch Zahlen aus 2023? Den gezeigten Chart zu den Energiequellen kann ich mit keiner anderen Datenquelle verifizieren. Nicht mal annähernd. Zugegeben. Die zum Vergleich herangezogenen Datenquellen zeigen alle nicht die gleichen Zahlen. Ihre gezeigten Daten liegen aber so weit aus dem recherchierten Datenraum, dass es kaum erklärbar ist. Könnten sie hier noch einmal nachprüfen? Vielen Dank!

I recently watched my first and only German show, Dark on Netflix. It was a great show in all aspects and the only weird thing is the anti nuclear message it has.

The problem, Sabine (also my daughter’s name), is the outright lying. We cannot accept any government official lying, not once, not ever. If an official lies, there must be immediate accountability by handing out the harshest of penalty. The crime in this case harder millions of people and was treason.

wow data from 2022? im a bit shocked about the one sided report.

Nice contribution, but just two little comments: Nuclear power plants do not order fuel rods but rather fuel bundles. And the fuel bundles shown in the video are used in CANDU reactors, not in Germany.

Parliament has a duty to inform itself. If they can't even do that right, they aren't fit for purpose. Don't tell me about how those innocent fools were simply duped by the big bad whoever. It's their job. Period.

People tend to underestimate how much Big Oil and Gas companies, lobbied against nuclear and coal for the past couple of decades.

The aversion to nuclear power astounds me. It’s one of the cleanest power sources available to us and can only hasten reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Thus, I am utterly bewildered that so-called environmentally conscious groups are so strongly opposed to nuclear power.

I could have told them this 20 years ago. So here’s the simple problem, but I think you should probably do several videos on the topic. Problem #1. We, even in the west, use the name Tsunami, a Japanese word, for a reason, Japan has a lot of Tsumani’s. There are three plates that converge under the Tokyo, Izu region. The region is very tectonically active. While Fukushima is NE of Tokyo it’s along a significant long stretch of strait plate boundary that has the potential of rupturing in one large event. The problem is that when this fault line last ruptured Northern Japan was still in its prehistoric. Problem #2. Fukushima was built in the late 1960s and Early 1970s its reactors had an estimated 25 year life. This would place them near their replacement life at in the late 1990’s. While they signified that life could be extended, but only with an intense schedule of inspections which included the plumbing system. The primary containment structure and the secondary containment structure. Problem number #3. A geologist had discovery that a large tsunami hit the Sendai region about 800 years ago. The height of the tsunami exceeded the critical infrastructure at Fukushima and other power stations, railways, and barriers. Problem #4. Single point of failure systems. If we want to be honest this is what caused Chernobyl, the attempt to keep a power plant running in a systemic power emergency (in Chernobyls case Jimmying the reactor when the test had already failed). In the case of Fukushima the fact that there was only (I.e. non-redundant means) of powering the plant is a system electrical emergency emerges. And the problem is not trivial because Japan is one of the most disaster prone areas of the world. Typhoons, Volcanism (Mt. Unzen, Sakura), Earthquakes (Hanjin-Awaji, Noda Peninsula Quake, Fukuoaka Quake) are all events that have occurred in the Nuclear Age. Thus back-up readiness is something require in Japan. Analysis of the Fukushima disaster. #1. The power plant was not the worst performing system. Believe or not, this fact needs to be restated. Over 20,000 people lost their lives because of the poor performance of coastal safety systems which underestimated the effects of coastal terrain on magnifying the amplitude of Tsunami’s which we know are going to happen in this part of Japan. Only one person died from Fukushima plant Emergency and his injuries are the result of cardiovascular stress. The disaster was indicative of systemic risk and multiple wide spread single point of failure system. Examples are topped sea walls in which people were an aware at there distance below the peak water heights. Trains and train systems that were washed away. etc. #2. Analysis of the geologist was not taken Seriously. Engineering systems typically have a margin of safety between a ‘stress’ state in a system and the minimal performance state. In this case if you might expect a 15 M tsunami, then you build your critical infrastructure above 30 M. So that even before the Geologist report Fukushima was not built above a margin of safety above the stress state. #3 combining #1 and #2 There was no provision for a failure of two systems. Particular a consideration that two critical systems would fail simultaneously from the same cause. IOW they did not have a functional Tsunami disaster reaction plan. #4 The power plants were not being inspected for problems one might expected in a seismically active country like Japan. Numerous cracks in the containment facilities were found, in addition some facilities were actually built on active fault zone. Systemic risk and failure in Japan. If we really want to prevent high loss of livelihood scenarios we need to examine regional risk. It’s best to do this away from the heavily politicized topic of nuclear power. Fortuitously, finding examples of system problems is not hard in a place where large disasters are an episodically frequent events. We are witnessing at the moment the continuing emergent crisis on the Noda Peninsula in which earthquakes reveal esoteric faulting and house that cannot be repaired and probably should not be rebuilt because of the instability of the underlying soils. A key event in Japan’s recent history was the Great Hanshin[-Awaji] Earthquake of 1995. This earthquake revealed a number of problems. It was said that the fault line was new, then later it was said that it was unknown. Both were not true. The fault line was at surface level in Awaji with a large presentation before agriculture began in the region. The farming activities buried the fault line in order make level fields. The fault line is typical of the type of diagonal fracture one sees as multiple plates merge at different angles, so the existence of such fractures is not unexpected. Moreover the question has to be asked should have the fault line been investigated. The answer here is exemplary of another engineering oversight. “The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge (Japanese: 明石海峡大橋, Hepburn: Akashi Kaikyō Ōhashi) is a suspension bridge which links the city of Kobe on the Japanese island of Honshu to Iwaya on Awaji Island. It is part of the Kobe-Awaji-Naruto Expressway, and crosses the busy and turbulent Akashi Strait (Akashi Kaikyō in Japanese).” The bridge fortunately was in construction, the fault line went under the main span of the bridge as a consequence … “The two towers were originally 1,990 m (6,530 ft) apart, but the Great Hanshin earthquake on January 17, 1995 (magnitude 7.3, with epicenter 20 km west of Kobe) moved the towers (the only structures that had been erected at the time) such that the central span had to be increased by 1 m (3.3 ft).” Had the bridge been completed the result could have been catastrophic. Thus we see the problem here of types of engineering oversights that build risk of system collapse if multiple parallel oversights in the system occur. To re-emphasize the first point, the issue, if you lost loved ones during the great Northern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami is not a nuclear problem, it was a systemic problem in governance. And so it is not unexpected that you are seeing similar problem of governance in Germany . . .politicians are not geologist or safety engineers, politicians want money to flow to their most valued campaign contributors those contributors like TEPCO or HSBEC that they are less regulated, spend less money on risk abatement and so they can distribute more funds to their shareholders. Similarly local municipalities don’t want to raise large bonds to fund seawall projects and invest more effort in ultra wide evacuation corridors. There needs to be independent review boards with the regulatory authority to override decisions made by elected authority when systemic risk is at issue. They need to have the authority to hire the best geologists and invest in research to determine region specific risks before nuclear plants are constructed and fail safe procedure that a free of single point failures. The margin of safety in these various construction projects needs to be scientifically investigated prior to commencement. Once the margin are set the engineers need to set how they are going to comply with requirements. During the operational lifetime of the projects during the down time the engineers need to have free rein over the facilities to look for points of potential failure. Again, the failure of the Francis Scott Key bridge by Dali is not simply a rogue ship hitting a bridge killing some people. It was a failure of safety protocols in the harbor authority, a failure of governance in the region that minimized the risk of collisions (which episodically happen in the US taking down main spans), it was a failure of the bridge authority to convey what types of forces could cause a single point failure. These are all political failures at the federal, state and local authorities that build risk. They want a bridge, they want a bustling port, the ship builders want to big bigger ships . . . . .these all intersect in at a disaster waiting to happen unless the scientist are called into assess the risk and the engineers assess mitigation tactics and the contractors build protection devices.

Bad idea to show Candu bundles when talking about fuel rods in German powerplants getting gradually less efficient. They're totally different!

Individuals in positions of power, is humanity's largest problem.

It's not just Germany. My father worked in a nuclear plant for the majority of his working career. It was a good job and that plant is still functioning, but the technology being employed is positively archaic. With modern technology, we should be able to make nuclear power cheaper (mass produced reactors??) and completely failsafe. Thinking that all nuclear power is bad because of accidents at nuclear facilities which were designed badly decades ago is the environmental analogy to shooting yourself in the foot. There are many parts of the world that aren't windy and don't have bright sunshine consistently. Nuclear works everywhere, all the time.