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emptybits 15 hours ago [-]
If you like Kraftwerk and you're not aware of this book, I recommend it:
"Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany", by Uwe Schütte. It's packed with details of albums, songs, tours, equipment, and people.
The anti-nuclear message in "Radio-Activity" certainly came later and was repeatedly updated, right into the Fukushima era [2011], but this was not the original sentiment [1976]. From the book:
"At the time, Billboard magazine featured the most-played singles by the large network of radio stations under the heading 'Radio Action'. The band seemed to have misread or misremembered this as 'Radio-Activity'. 'Suddenly,' remembers Wolfgang Flür, 'there was a theme in the air, the activity of radio stations, and the title of 'Radioactivity is in the Air for You and Me' was born. All we needed was the music to go with it. ... The ambiguity of the theme didn't come until later.' Radio-Activity was intended to celebrate radio broadcasting as a convenient, easy and democratic means to listen to music and news."
TedDoesntTalk 14 hours ago [-]
Great story. Had no idea. Still love the name Uwe. One of those German names that doesn’t have an English equivalent unlike, say, Pieter.
Bairfhionn 13 hours ago [-]
Pieter is Dutch. German version of it is Peter.
KKOSer 12 hours ago [-]
I was told once Hugh is the nearest equivalent to Uwe, but i can't tell if thats correct.
rob74 9 hours ago [-]
According to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uwe, the only certainly known "relative" of Uwe is Ove, which is used in Scandinavian countries. Other than that, the origin of the name is unclear, and there is a theory it might be related to Oswald.
nielsole 7 hours ago [-]
Owen seems pretty close, especially considering the Nordic variant Ove.
ginko 7 hours ago [-]
I think that similarity is accidental though. Owen is a Welsh given name. Ove/Uwe is Germanic.
I love Kraftwerk, but contributing to anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany hasn't been a major success. If only more European countries had followed the French example and developed substantial nuclear fleets.
boshomi 11 hours ago [-]
Nuclear power has been killed off by economic forces; there’s no turning back.
Solar and wind power generate cheap electricity in abundance, and midday electricity prices in Europe regularly dip into negative territory (as low as minus €500 (sic!) on May 1!).
Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices.
The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.
amarant 50 minutes ago [-]
Electricity prices in Sweden have tripled as a direct result of the political decision to shut down German nuclear power(interconnected grid)
Even the German government has admitted it was a mistake.[1]
Solar generates an abundance of electricity in the summer, but the winter production ranges from tiny to nothing.
The anti nuclear crowd loves looking at buildout graphs and saying we can replace all energy production with solar in x years, assuming energy usage remains the same.
If power is so cheap mid-day, why don't european buildings have sufficient air conditioning not to kill the elderly during heat waves? The laws restricting AC all have power conservation as their rationale.
titanomachy 7 hours ago [-]
Do old people not have air conditioning because the law prohibits it? I thought it was more that air conditioners are expensive, old people in Europe are often somewhat poor and on fixed incomes, and a lot of historically temperate places in Europe have no tradition of AC.
Certainly a lot of the young wealthy people I know in Europe have AC, even outside of the really hot places.
khafra 6 hours ago [-]
The death toll per heat wave can easily hit 5 figures in just france. A hybrid portable-minisplit that will cool a 100m^2 apartment is under a thousand euros, and draw just under a Mwh per year. A portable to cool one small bedroom is much less power-efficient, but can often be found between 200 and 300.
That's not cheap, per se, but funerals aren't much less expensive in Europe than in America.
Many EU countries allow some limited cooling in public buildings, but I still sweat in most grocery stores, malls, libraries, museums, etc. during hot weather--they just don't take air conditioning to a comfortable temperature as worth the power bill, the way America does.
titanomachy 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it makes sense to get it and they'll have it eventually. It's a cultural shift as much as anything, it will take time.
The cooler parts of the US (e.g. the PNW) are also gradually increasing AC adoption as things heat up, but 20 years ago it was pretty much unheard of.
nrjames 5 hours ago [-]
Paris is working on some type of underground cooled-water network for AC in industrial settings.
Why are ACs so expensive in Europe? A window AC can be had from Walmart for like $120.
titanomachy 4 hours ago [-]
Mini-splits are more complicated than window ACs, they allow the indoor and outdoor components to be separated.
Most European homes don't have the kind of window that you could stick an AC in, the windows hinge rather than sliding up and down. You can get one of those floor units with a hose for probably ~€300 though.
noosphr 9 hours ago [-]
Nuclear power died 20 years ago for 40 years now.
Meanwhile Chinas 2060 plan for a carbon zero grid with 25% nuclear and 100% over provisioning is right on track.
ZeroGravitas 6 hours ago [-]
So their 2060 target is a lower percentage than the EU has today? Which is itself 50% lower than the EU had 20 years ago.
I think that's a pretty good support for the notion that nuclear is past its prime.
> According to the China Nuclear Energy Association, despite higher output, nuclear’s share of China’s total electricity production slightly slipped from 4.9 percent in 2023 to 4.7 percent in 2024, (Energy Institute data indicate a 3.7-percent increase in net production and a drop from 4.7 percent to 4.5 percent of the nuclear share).40 The remarkable share decline occurred because China’s electricity consumption grew by 6.8 percent or 627 TWh—significantly larger than Germany’s total annual demand—to a total of over 9,850 TWh, and the country added a combined 357 GW of solar and wind capacity (278 GW and 79 GW, respectively) in the same year compared to just 3.5 GW of new nuclear.41
> China has dominated global nuclear power development over the past quarter-century, though its ambitious latest Five-Year Plan targets have proven challenging to meet.
The 10th Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) put forward a policy of “moderate development of nuclear power,” targeting around 8.6 GW gross operating capacity by 2005,61 with 7.1 GW gross achieved in reality. (All Five-Year Plan capacity numbers quoted hereunder are gross gigawatts).
During this period, China connected six new units to the grid—including two French 900-MW reactors at Ling Ao and two Canadian 668-MW CANDU 6 reactors at Qinshan—and completed the development of the CPR-1000, China’s indigenized version of the French M310 900-MW design that would become the workhorse of its early nuclear fleet.
The 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) called on China to pursue “an active development of nuclear power” with a target of 10 GW gross operating by 2010.62 With 10.9 GW gross operating at the end of 2010, that target was slightly over-achieved.
This period saw the construction starts for Westinghouse’s two AP-1000s at Sanmen in 2009 and AREVA’s EPRs at Taishan in 2009–2010, China’s first Gen III projects. Construction commenced on 29 units, most of which were CPR-1000 reactors.
Fukushima’s March 2011 disaster fundamentally reshaped China’s nuclear trajectory during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015). The government imposed a moratorium on new approvals to conduct comprehensive safety reviews. Existing plants and Gen II reactors under construction had to undergo major upgrades including enhanced flood barriers, backup power system overhauls, and seismic reinforcements.63
When approvals resumed, China adopted a strict “Gen III-only” policy requiring passive safety features and core-catchers. Operational capacity reached just 28.7 GW by 2015 versus a target of 40 GW.64 Nevertheless, the period closed with construction beginning on Fuqing-5 and -6 as well as Fangchenggang-3, China’s first Hualong One reactors, representing its indigenous Gen III technology.
The 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) aimed for 58 GW operational capacity plus 30 GW under construction while establishing the Hualong One as an exportable technology and advancing systems like the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR-PM) and fast reactors.65
However, domestic capacity reached only 51 GW by 2020 and 17.5 GW under construction constrained by the ongoing inland reactor ban— a controversy unheard of in other nuclear countries limiting nuclear power plant development to the seashore—and extended construction timelines for Generation III units.
In August 2019, the U.S. added CGN to its Entity List,66 citing national security concerns regarding alleged attempts to acquire U.S. technology for military purposes.67 This restricted CGN’s access to certain technologies and affected its international partnerships, including involvement in nuclear projects in the United Kingdom. Later, CNNC was also added to the Entity List.68 The sanctions reinforced China’s focus on self-reliance, accelerating the transition from foreign technologies to the domestically developed Hualong One design.
With an operating capacity of around 61 GW as of mid-2025, the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025)69 target of 70 GW operational capacity is out of reach. According to plans, 4.5 GW are scheduled to come online in 2025, but no new reactor started up in the first half of the year. COVID-19 pandemic disruptions to global supply chains, combined with delays caused by mandatory safety upgrades, have created persistent bottlenecks. First-of-a-kind Hualong One projects saw numerous delays (see Figure 23).
Meanwhile, plans for innovative projects like offshore floating nuclear power platforms appear to have stalled, with 2023 reports suggesting the program may have been suspended over safety and feasibility concerns.70
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
Remember all those projections of solar adoption that, year after year, consistently underestimated future growth?
It turns out the same has been happening with nuclear, only in reverse: the agencies doing the projections have consistently, year after year, overestimated nuclear growth.
Yeah they found gas in the Netherlands which was exported for cheap all across Western Europe.
It's not because of hippies or Chernobyl that nuclear reactors never got built.
A gas turbine is cheap and simple.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
Gas turbines are a modern scientific/technological miracle.
The materials science of turbine blades is awesome. Most materials can't be used above about 1/2 their absolute melting temperature as they become subject to creep. But turbine blades are made with nickel and aluminum (and a carefully optimized mix of alloying elements) that just happen to form phases that become less subject to creep as they are heated (until much closer to the melting point).
The reason (as I understand it) for this is that the intermetallic phase of NiAl prevents migration of single linear dislocations; pairs of linear dislocations are needed to migrate together. But at elevated temperature these pairs dissociate from each other and migration is inhibited.
Gud 11 hours ago [-]
Nuclear power has been amazing for my native country Sweden and I do not believe for a nanosecond that there were “economic forces” that shut down many of our operational nuclear plants.
It was political lunacy, in Sweden and Germany and many other countries.
amarant 39 minutes ago [-]
Yeah our green parties brag about how they have made nuclear unfeasible via political means, and then turn around to say it's market forces. It's so stupid I want to cry.
Miljöpartiet in particular is anti-science and has among the worst environment policies of all major Swedish parties. For example they're working hard to ban spreading sludge from wastewater treatment plants on fields. Apparently phosphors are single-use.
I take a center position on this: every year new nuclear looks worse economically, but that's not a good reason to shut down already operating plants.
The safety issues .. I think the combination of low probability (unknown) and potentially huge cost (Chernobyl affected almost the entirety of Europe!) make it exceptionally prone to toxic discourse. You just can't assign reliable numbers to it. There's a risk of ending up with a Space Shuttle situation, where because a disaster would be so bad everyone in the chain downplays the risk until an O-ring explodes.
Maybe we can try SMRs once they're actually in production, but somewhere else can try them first on their own expense.
rob74 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is just that already operating plants don't become safer or more state of the art as time goes by. I'd be as comfortable with a 70-year-old nuclear power plant as I would be flying in a 70-year-old airplane...
Ringz 7 hours ago [-]
And don’t forget they will get more expensive over time.
ttkari 8 hours ago [-]
It certainly was political - with tax policies, you can make nuclear uneconomic which is exactly what happened in Sweden. For decades, the production and capacity taxes were a material part of the operating cost for operators. Only some 10 years ago the political positions started to change and become more nuclear-friendly.
dyauspitr 5 hours ago [-]
Then why are China and India building so much nuclear?
Neil44 10 hours ago [-]
Solar and wind are still heavily subsidized are they not? If they're so economically amazing why are they subsidized?
Someone 7 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure they are heavily subsidized (alone or compared to other energy sources), but let’s ignore that.
Because they require an upfront investment that many households cannot make.
Also, whether such investments make economical sense for companies hugely depends on interest rate, and that fluctuates.
Because of that, a country with a long term goal to decrease dependency on non-renewables may want to subsidize such investments.
AdamN 10 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure why subsidies are per se bad. But also almost all infrastructure is subsidized regardless: roads, trains (cargo as well), ports, nuclear, coal, etc...
Neil44 8 hours ago [-]
I did not express an opinion on whether subsidies are good or bad :)
AdamN 5 hours ago [-]
You expressed an opinion with how you framed it.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
Given that we're approaching 1 TW of new solar capacity installed globally each year, who do you think is doing the subsidizing?
RugnirViking 10 hours ago [-]
because they're really important? both for the planet but also for strategic energy independance (no gas from russia, no oil from hormuz or america, light from the sun and wind from the air is all thats needed)
01100011 18 hours ago [-]
Like most backward looking judgements these days, such things require understanding the culture and zeitgeist of the mid 70s.
I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
lizardking 57 minutes ago [-]
There is a difference between the "smart" thing to do and what's considered to be the right opinion by "smart" people. Lobotomies were endorsed by elite medical opinion (Moniz won a Nobel for it in 1949). Smart-person consensus often doesn't survive contact with reality. Smart people are as susceptible to groupthink, moral panics, and manias as anybody else.
jcul 12 hours ago [-]
I think Chernobyl was a big factor in European sentiment towards nuclear power too, in the 80s / 90s.
I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.
cluckindan 14 hours ago [-]
More like the robot thing to do.
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.
Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.
Qdulf 13 hours ago [-]
This is historical revisionism. Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is rooted in the peace movement and environmentalism, with the majority of public discourse starting in the 1970s.
The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.
Everything that follows is just a reaction.
My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.
AdamN 10 hours ago [-]
It's kind of all of the above. State and non-state actors have leveraged pretty much every movement there is to their own ends: civil rights, anti-nuclear, pro-nuclear, anti-Iranian government sentiment, pro-Iranian government sentiment, even jazz tours in Europe which were assisted by US intelligence orgs in the 20th century.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
TitaRusell 8 hours ago [-]
Pro nuclear comes from American conservatives. The same people who claim climate change is a hoax. The same people who hate green energy solutions.
cluckindan 7 hours ago [-]
Pro-nuclear comes from scientifically informed progressives, definitely not conservatives.
Nuclear IS a green energy solution.
AdamN 5 hours ago [-]
There's a modern argument that nuclear is greener than oil, gas, and even hydro and everything else. That's pretty new though (and certainly not a no-brainer).
Ringz 7 hours ago [-]
Again. Show us some peer reviewed studies for your claims. A simple search will show you that, according to dozens or hundreds of peer reviewed studies, research and real world examples, a 100% renewable energy solution is feasible.
cluckindan 8 hours ago [-]
Revisionism it is not. It was Schröder’s administration that shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants.
Where is the peace movement and so-called environmentalism rooted?
Pro-nuclear is pro-environment.
The alternatives are fossil fuels and renewables, which are both extremely anti-environment: water power require large artificial reservoirs and create flood risks, wind power kills/drives away wildlife and is almost useless without efficient large—scale energy storage and other methods of power generation, while solar also requires storage and other power generation but also requires mining of rare earth metals.
Of course we could just stop all of our industries to save power. No more production, no more consumption, no more pollution.
iSnow 6 hours ago [-]
>It was Schröder’s administration that shut down Germany’s nuclear power plants.
That's not even true, it was Merkel's administration. Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion, only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.
The modern anti-nuclear movement in Germany got started in the 1970's by the TMI accident and a book named "Der Atom-Staat". Chornobyl of course put the nails into the coffin.
Ringz 7 hours ago [-]
The alternative is only renewables. And we don’t have to stop all industries for it.
Show us some evidence based and peer reviewed studies for your claims. Repeating the same old and scientifically unproved claims doesn’t help.
usrusr 9 hours ago [-]
We don't know what to what fraction that peace movement ran on being propped up by KGB. Those things are not mutually exclusive, genuine protest and getting propped up by a foreign power just for destabilization and giggles.
Just like that Red Army Faction group whose name in hindsight was much closer to the truth than anyone really assumed at the time. At least at some point it clearly was a KGB operation (visits to a certain Dresden office are documented, and yes, guess who was also stationed in Dresden at the time), likely not from the start but quickly co-opted. KGB, as in the service that was built on the experience of how Germany solved their eastern front in WWI through organizing passage from Zurich for a certain dissident.
Yes, those movements were genuine. But they were also directed to some extent. The fictional Tischbier character in Deutschland 83 comes somewhat close to illustrating that ambiguity.
Mashimo 12 hours ago [-]
Indeed. Also Asse was a political decision, against the scientist who found better places to put the waste, but Asse II was close to east Germany. And West German politicians wanted to give a big "screw you" to East Germany, because they also did something similar.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
lukan 12 hours ago [-]
Sure, it was all Schröders fault.
It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.
Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.
Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.
What makes you think the Chernobyl accident was not embraced to influence European policy?
shmeeed 3 hours ago [-]
Occam's razor.
retired 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Mashimo 12 hours ago [-]
You still can't eat Mushrooms and wild Boar meet has to be tested in certain places in Germany. That was before Schröder.
Combine that with political decision to put waste into Asse II. Not because it was a good place, just screw with East Germany.
Big demonstration like Brokdorf where around 81. Schroeder begun being a Ministerpräsident in 1990, and 1998 Bundeskanzler.
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
Not at all, we look into Fukushima and Chernobyl as examples of what actual happens when things don't go as the advocates sell it.
And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.
usrusr 9 hours ago [-]
Fukushima hit hard in (West) Germany: Chernobyl was mostly explained away with "because Soviet", it wasn't that hard to convince people that much safer nuclear was possible. But Japan, of all countries, not being able to safely run a reactor? The country of trains running on time and of Toyotas making domestic cars look laughably unreliable in ADAC statistics?
5 hours ago [-]
cluckindan 8 hours ago [-]
In the last 70 years, 600-700 nuclear reactors have been in operation worldwide, and three of them have had major accidents. You already mentioned two of them, the third is Three Mile Island.
That’s a catastrophic failure rate under 0.5 percent. Sure, the effects of a failure spread widely and can be a hazard for a long time, but personally I would want to see the same risk-averse sentiment applied to production and use of perfluorinated compounds and fossil fuels, since both of those can spread much farther and cause more of a hazard.
The cherry on top: coal power plants spread significant amounts of radionuclides into the environment.
acdha 8 hours ago [-]
Around the turn of the century that was a stronger argument–it’s one of the reasons why I backed nuclear then–but now we have cheaper renewables which can be online decades sooner so the choice isn’t nuclear vs. coal but vs. solar & wind which have orders of magnitude less pollution. Even if we’re talking natural gas, which has killed coal economically, there’s still far more pollution and direct health risk avoided by picking renewables.
If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.
cluckindan 7 hours ago [-]
Solar and wind haven’t yet solved the two major issues: producing power 24/7/365 even when it isn’t sunny or windy (or when it’s too windy).
Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.
Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.
pingou 6 hours ago [-]
Most batteries do not use rare earth metals.
Even if they did and it was an issue, we would find alternatives if that was necessary, just like rare earth free motors were developed to avoid all the downsides of that come with those.
Have a look at CATL’s sodium-ion batteries, they do not use anything expensive, rare, or particularly damaging to extract from the environment.
Ringz 6 hours ago [-]
Uranium mines will become a problem if every country tries to make 25% of electricity with nuclear. Electrification of primary energy might even need more nuclear according to some pro nuclear people.
Many forget that while there is plenty of uranium on Earth, most of it occurs in very low concentrations. The lower the concentration, the higher the CO₂ emissions for the entire uranium chain from the mine to the fuel rod.
Meanwhile, renewable energies receive free fuel from the sun. They are already recyclable today and, with intelligent local and intercontinental grids, will also require fewer batteries for storage.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
One nuclear accident is already one too many.
stevesimmons 1 hours ago [-]
As opposed to premature deaths from fossil fuel emissions, deaths of rooftop solar installers (surprisingly common), wars in the Middle East involving oil interests, drowning and environmental damage from dam failures, etc, etc.
cluckindan 7 hours ago [-]
One Parkersburg, WV is already one too many, yet next to nothing is done.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Chernobyl area is still no man's land, 40 years later.
youngtaff 11 hours ago [-]
There’s not actually that much high level waste… thing the UK has a couple swimming pools worth after 50 years of operating reactors
JuniperMesos 14 hours ago [-]
I quite enjoy the 1979 Dan Fogelberg song Face the Fire from a purely musical perspective, despite it being an anti-nuclear-power anthem written in the wake of three mile island. There's no reason to expect that Kraftwork's poltical ideas are good ones or were good ones at the time, even if it resulted in some good music.
account42 12 hours ago [-]
No it was never the smart thing, always an uninformed emotional reaction based on fear.
atoav 12 hours ago [-]
I grew in the area most hit by Chernobyl fallout in Europe. The disfigured newborn kids who didn't make it would probably not share your view.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
rectang 11 hours ago [-]
There are a number of pro-nuclear advocates on this page who can’t just engage in good faith but instead dismiss and deride their interlocutors as “crazy”, “paranoid”, “fear mongers“. It’s infuriating because the origins of anti-nuclear sentiments are often plain and perfectly understandable, as your poignant anecdotes illustrate.
pfdietz 6 hours ago [-]
I'd get angry with them, but at this point the renewable wave is so overwhelming and unstoppable that they are just screaming into the void. I know they are set up for bitter disappointment, having constructed a false defensive narrative to prop up their world view, and I kind of pity them.
Ok, maybe not that very last part.
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
I rather not have another Fukushima or Chernobyl in Europe.
colechristensen 17 hours ago [-]
It was largely our own governments wanting to scare us of nukes so we'd be scared of the Soviets, like in America with the schoolchildren doing duck and cover drills.
Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.
Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
TurdF3rguson 15 hours ago [-]
The Soviets were parking nukes in Cuba in striking distance of the White House. If that's not legitimately terrifying to you, I just don't know.
thombat 14 hours ago [-]
Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship
GJim 12 hours ago [-]
It's genuinely amazing how few people in the USA appear to be aware of what you have written.
It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.
satao 8 hours ago [-]
americans are the most brainwashed people on earth when you consider how naïve of their own propaganda they are
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Which in hindsight seems like just a sideshow, since both sides already had ICBMs in development that can strike from anywhere in the world.
zorked 15 hours ago [-]
Not anymore than the US being able to strike worldwide to this very moment. They are the only country that has used nuclear bombs against civilians.
The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.
TurdF3rguson 15 hours ago [-]
One of those things is scarier to American school children and their teachers than the other.
pjc50 10 hours ago [-]
Objectively, nukes have killed 0 American school children and their teachers while legal constitutional American gun owners have killed thousands every year.
The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.
lostlogin 11 hours ago [-]
School children aren’t easily scared by boogie men, but maybe they should be. The Iranian girls found this out.
soperj 12 hours ago [-]
scariest thing for American School children and their teachers is the way that the second amendment is administered.
Tepix 14 hours ago [-]
Their nukes are still within striking distance.
01100011 16 hours ago [-]
I think it came from peaceniks and hippies mostly. You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism.
There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
pjc50 11 hours ago [-]
> There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s
Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.
> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking
I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.
happymellon 14 hours ago [-]
> anti-vax liberals
Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
soperj 13 hours ago [-]
hate to tell you this, but there's a whole contingent of "granola moms" who won't vax their children. They're the same people that subscribe to those teething stones that are really only a strangulation risk.
happymellon 12 hours ago [-]
Yep, and a lot of what they say is deeply conspiratorial conservative rhetoric.
They may be self described liberal, but their actions certainly aren't.
soperj 3 hours ago [-]
Conspiratorial sure, conservative though not sure how it gets labelled that. It's not a deeply ingrained philosophy of conservatism, and crazy is broad spectrum.
tekla 7 hours ago [-]
Its so fucking wild to see how fast the winds change. And since its inconveniently politically incorrect, history rewrites or "they were actually the opposite of us and lying"
Anti-Vax people are/were seen the leftist idiots who were anti-capitalist, anti-corpo, anti-the fascist govt, who would rather have died of preventable diseases than perpetuate the medical industry and its capitalist schemes trying to keep us sick to sell drugs and also ban weed.
It's so funny to watch the political sides swap and the doublethink take all of a few days to propogate.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
When antivax was a lefty thing, it was a tiny percentage. The most wacky on the left always get the most airplay for some reason, making their views seem more mainstream than they really are.
Since antivax is now popular on the right, it has grown into a much larger proportion of the populace. It doesn't help that they now have positions in government.
01100011 2 hours ago [-]
It's not surprising.
As a kid I was an anarcho-communist punk rocker but I had a friend who was a christian and his parents were scammy, MLM, right-wing conservative types(think Rush Limbaugh but loonier) who distrusted the government and lied on their taxes. It was obvious how the wings of the political spectrum almost touch at times.
Paranoia and distrust of institutions, mystical thinking, adherence to alternative truth structures.. these are apolitical just as mental illness is also apolitical.
JuniperMesos 12 hours ago [-]
There are both liberal and conservative strains of anti-vaccination sentiment that have been more or less prominent at various times.
secretsatan 14 hours ago [-]
There is undeniably a middle class anti vax wellness leftist movement whether it was originally conservative or not, unfortunately.
userbinator 13 hours ago [-]
Appeal to nature is something that definitely cuts across the political spectrum.
lostlogin 11 hours ago [-]
> Appeal to nature is something that definitely cuts across the political spectrum.
I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Conservation used to be quite popular in conservative circles before it got branded as a lefty position. Once that happened, everyone who thought of themselves as conservative started running away from it.
The US EPA was created by Richard Nixon, for example.
happymellon 12 hours ago [-]
> wellness leftist movement
Hang on, are we talking about liberal or leftist now?
Because a lot of these hoax "wellness" movements are conservative. Distrusting science and things you don't understand is a conservative mindset.
TheOtherHobbes 9 hours ago [-]
And trusting science while distrusting technology you do understand is a leftist mindset.
happymellon 1 hours ago [-]
I've never heard of that as a leftist mindset.
Do you have examples? People like the Luddites weren't distrusting of technology, they were distrusting of the owners using it to depress wages.
Forgeties79 7 hours ago [-]
> You're talking about the equivalent of modern anti-vax liberals. Anti-science and given to conspiracies and mysticism
In 2026 this is decidedly a more conservative stance. They installed RFK Jr., who in addition to Wakefield, is the antivax guy. MAHA specifically (can’t believe they actually stuck with that acronym) is overwhelmingly Republican dominated/supported.
wolfi1 11 hours ago [-]
nuclear is only cheap, if taxpayers pay for it, if all costs would be considered, nuclear is not cheap
kingleopold 19 hours ago [-]
coal kills more people, this is a fact. so with blocking nuclear lead to coal, so they indirectly supportered killing thousands, incredible stats really.
who said art can't be bad for the public?
kev009 18 hours ago [-]
A hidden danger of coal is ironically the radioactivity of its waste, which gets put into concrete products and contribute to indoor air quality issues.
The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
9dev 12 hours ago [-]
None of you ever manages to answer the waste storage question. That was, and still is, one of the deciding factors in Germany, for example.
account42 11 hours ago [-]
Because its an irrelevant problem. The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.
roryirvine 6 hours ago [-]
Miniscule, yet extremely dangerous and incredibly difficult & expensive to deal with.
The estimated cost of making the UK's current stock of waste safe is currently £136bn, for a value of "safe" that leaves at least one of the high level waste pools being at an "intolerable" level of risk of leaking into groundwater until the late 2050s.
For comparison, the estimated cost of achieving net zero in the UK by 2050 is £110bn.
9dev 11 hours ago [-]
It’s only irrelevant to you as long as it doesn’t leak into your ground water supply after a few decades down the line, when we discover the containment didn’t resist corrosion as well as we thought. The danger of nuclear waste does not correspond to the amount at all.
lostlogin 11 hours ago [-]
> The amount of waste nuclear produces is miniscule.
And yet people worry about it and the OP claims it led to the situation in Germany.
Maybe addressing the issue needs to occur, rather than dismissing it?
rob74 8 hours ago [-]
Then again, if we hadn't had the Cold War and the associated nuclear arms race, we wouldn't have had civil nuclear power either, so...
Tangurena2 7 hours ago [-]
According to the author of The Curve of Binding Energy [0], civil reactors were being subsidized by the purchase of plutonium (from the spent fuel rods) by the Department of Energy [1] to the tune of $1,000,000 per kg of Pu. The end of this program was coincidentally at about the same time as the Three Mile Island incident which leads many people to think that reaction to TMI was the reason that US reactor construction stopped.
When the Senate ratified some non-proliferation treaties, that also ended reprocessing spent fuel in the US which gets blamed on Carter.
1 - The DOE owns all of the US nuclear weapons and leases them to the DOD.
mejutoco 13 hours ago [-]
> The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War
And Chernobyl. And Fukushima. Nuclear is great but it has some very real risks
butlike 3 hours ago [-]
Nuclear won't be ready until fusion (so if ever). The only safe nuclear is when the byproduct is helium
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
Just for curiosity, are there proposed fusion reactor designs that don't create nuclear waste? I haven't followed what's going on in that space at all.
butlike 1 minutes ago [-]
All fusion reactors by definition (to my understanding) don't produce the same waste we're used to since it doesn't require fission. The byproduct is literally helium. If a catastrophe happens, the reactor implodes instead of explodes, so the concern for the surrounding environs is far less than with fission reactors. The only issue is that fusion reactors have been perpetually out-of-reach for decades.
ndsipa_pomu 12 hours ago [-]
Don't forget Windscale and Three Mile Island
Tepix 14 hours ago [-]
I, for one, am glad we don‘t have yet another 2600 square kilometers exclusion zone in densely populated Germany, like the one around Chernobyl.
Rygian 13 hours ago [-]
I'm glad we don't have exclusion zones like that one in France either.
msla 19 hours ago [-]
Being against nuclear only kept the world on coal longer.
rectang 18 hours ago [-]
And perhaps meaningfully contributed to a reduction in the quantity of radioactive waste products requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
acidburnNSA 17 hours ago [-]
I always find this sentiment curious for 2 reasons:
1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.
2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).
Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
rectang 15 hours ago [-]
I don't trust the coal industry to manage forever chemicals over the long term, and I don't trust the nuclear industry to manage spent nuclear fuel over the long term.
The question that matters for both industries is what bad things happen when their stewardship inevitably lapses and the happy path dead-ends.
I don't like either answer, so that heightens the urgency of pursuing alternatives with fewer long-lived hazardous byproducts. Neither coal nor nuclear is an acceptable long term solution.
amanaplanacanal 3 hours ago [-]
It's not just coal and nuclear. We have intentionally set up our society so that the people that own and run corporations are not responsible for the long term damage they cause. They extract the profits, and when the bill comes due for what they have done to the rest of us, limited liability and bankruptcy protects them from what they have done.
We did this so that people can buy stock on the market without having to take any responsibility for what they are doing. It's certainly a great funding mechanism, though.
cma 15 hours ago [-]
There were also big proliferation concerns out of 70s era designs.
mgfist 18 hours ago [-]
Coal power produces more radiation waste into the environment than nuclear power. That's because nuclear power has this amazing quality where all the waste is neatly packaged whereas burning coal just releases it into the air.
> requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
rectang 17 hours ago [-]
I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
mgfist 17 hours ago [-]
> I distrust techno-optimist promises to manage ever-growing collections of spent nuclear fuel over millennia. We can hardly trust plant operators to manage it safely over decades.
Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison.
> Will it actually get encased successfully
Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades.
> will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move
What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun.
> will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on.
> The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale.
It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
mejutoco 13 hours ago [-]
You argue it is safe. When it is not (Chernobyl, Fukushima) then you argue it kills less people. That is before considering the possibility of these sites being attacked during war (see Zaporizhia in Ukraine) and how centralized they are vs solar.
Rectang explained it very well, and all their points stand imo.
mgfist 6 hours ago [-]
60 deaths attributed to Chernobyl.
1 death attributed to Fukushima.
0 deaths attributed to Three Mile Island.
Meanwhile, deaths in the fossil fuel industry total hundreds to thousands every year.
Now before you say "but wait, I've seen estimates of thousands of deaths linked to Chernobyl" - then we must also include all the deaths caused from fossil fuel carbon emissions and radiation emissions, which total in the hundreds of thousands every year.
> You argue it is safe
I do! The fact that a nuclear plant was struck by a tsunami and yet just 1 person died from the radiation fallout is pretty damn amazing. That's about as bad as it gets and yet the result was the same as an oil well accident.
varjag 11 hours ago [-]
Belarus had markedly increased general cancer rate post-1986. At the time most of that was fatal. None of that naturally is included in site personnel and firefighter fatalities that IAEA recognises as the only casualties.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
mgfist 6 hours ago [-]
Those numbers are still in the single digit thousands. Meanwhile how many deaths have been caused by fossil fuel emissions (both carbon, and local, and radiation). Very very hard to predict, but you see estimates going up to the many millions.
varjag 4 hours ago [-]
Would you argue that Bhopal was a nothingburger because it is dwarfed by residual emissions worldwide over decades?
These are consequences from single incident, for a power source that has minuscule share of generation worldwide. The second similar event had also led to exclusion of substantial territory and only avoided massive health effects due to wind pattern towards the ocean.
And if nuclear proliferated more to geography prone to low safety culture and warfare the toll could up considerably.
Either way nobody argues for replacement of nuclear with coal in this day of age. Renewables are the fastest growing energy sector.
mgfist 4 hours ago [-]
Bhopal helps my argument. The consequences of that were far worse than Chernobyl and yet I’d bet for every 1,000 people who have heard of Chernobyl only one or two would know about Bhopal.
varjag 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure how that matters even if it was true. Here I am clearly aware of both. And if I were not, does it make people less dead?
If nuclear became #1 power source and instead of 25 year cadence we had IAEA scale 7 events every 1.5 years, would you still argue it's a net win?
mgfist 3 hours ago [-]
> If nuclear became #1 power source and instead of 25 year cadence we had IAEA scale 7 events every 1.5 years, would you still argue it's a net win?
Events like Fukushima would be worthwhile tradeoffs. Events like Chernobyl would not, but that would require nigh non-existent safety regulations.
To put it in layman's terms - I'd much much much rather live right next to a US operated nuclear power plant than a US operated coal plant. In fact I do live rather close to several nuclear power plants.
Im also not against solar or wind, but energy diversity is important for national and energy security purposes
AngryData 15 hours ago [-]
Because of anti-nuclear sentiments we are right now currently storing used nuclear waste in its most dangerous form in the most open and uncontained and open storage lots. Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me. If humans blast themselves back to the neolithic era and 5,000 years from now some dudes die from walking into some old facility die, who cares? There are masses of people dieing right now because we are still relying on fossil fuels, many of them from cancer from breathing the radioactive fallout that is downstream of every coal plant.
rectang 14 hours ago [-]
Seems to me that pro-nuclear sentiments have at least as much to do with ongoing accumulation of nuclear waste as anti-nuclear sentiments.
> Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me.
Blithe minimization of the problem of storing nuclear waste over millenia feels like "Peak HN". :)
("Peak HN" jabs are a cheap shot, though — so let me engage more seriously...)
First, "coal vs nuclear" is a false dichotomy. Everybody I see advocating for nuclear power in this thread is advocating for it as a permanent solution rather than an interim solution — in which case there are other competitors.
Second, if nuclear waste is too dangerous for less-than-ideal storage conditions, that speaks negatively to the viability of nuclear power — because over the long term less-than-ideal storage is guaranteed by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
p2detar 12 hours ago [-]
> by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
Simply untrue. Finland‘s Onkalo is exactly that-a storage solution engineered to require zero stewardship. It is possible and now we know we can do it right. Storage is the weakest argument against nuclear.
By the way, Solar panels and wind turbines contain heavy metals with no decay path, e.g. Cadmium. Nuclear waste at least decays after apprx. 1000 years with spent fuel roughly as radioactive as the uranium ore originally mined for it.
The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me. Especially since nuclear and renewables actually complement each other really well. We can use nuclear for baseload and renewables filling in on top when sun and wind are available.
rectang 10 hours ago [-]
Onkalo is the best approximation so far of of a memory hole for nuclear waste — but Finland has not agreed to accept all the world’s nuclear waste, similar sites are not available for all countries, and in practice storage remains a major point of contention as a wander through this discussion will show.
> The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me.
I sometimes feel similarly about pro-nuclear cheer mongering.
18 hours ago [-]
9 hours ago [-]
soperj 12 hours ago [-]
Coal also produces radioactive byproducts. They just release them into the air.
rectang 12 hours ago [-]
Brazil nuts and bananas are radioactive too, compared to other foods — but do not pose risks compared to coal ash.
Similarly, while coal ash is nasty stuff that kills lots of people, it lacks many of the qualities that make spent nuclear fuel especially difficult to manage even in small amounts.
For example, a “dirty bomb” made by packing coal ash around conventional explosives would be far less effective than one made from spent nuclear fuel.
senectus1 19 hours ago [-]
only if renewable resources are not considered an option.
lionkor 11 hours ago [-]
It's a fact that Germany turned off nuclear and subsequently extended the lifetime of brown coal power plants (they still run). Germany has plenty of renewable energy, but that is not a replacement for a steady base supply of power yet.
pepa65 19 hours ago [-]
What do you mean by "nuclear fleets"??
acidburnNSA 17 hours ago [-]
This is often used within the industry to mean many dozens of commercial nuclear power plants.
stefantalpalaru 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
aa-jv 11 hours ago [-]
Kraftwerk killed nuclear power (Radio-Activity) and promoted petroleum consumption (Autobahn), like the true factory-idol industrialists they are ...
rob74 8 hours ago [-]
I think you're slightly overestimating their influence there... my theory is that they addressed all of these topics (along with others like robots, high speed trains and models) simply because they sounded cool and/or futuristic and fit their futuristic music. The article mentions that Radio-Activity only became an anti-nuclear song in the 1991 re-release.
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
I just saw the Fukushima documentary over the weekend, no thanks.
lionkor 11 hours ago [-]
As opposed to brown coal? Because that's what we got instead, and it's much more deadly, much more radioactive, and the toxic waste it produces is not properly controlled like for nuclear.
Of course pollution looks bad when you have to barrel it, instead of just shitting it out into the environment (atmosphere, etc) and saying "we'll stop doing this in a couple decades, don't worry".
I understand that brown coal isn't what people had in mind when they opposed nuclear; they would rather have wind power, solar power, maybe magical fairy dust, but they didn't consider that, practically, we will stick with brown coal.
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
No worries, paper straws will save the day.
We could start by actually having a DB that works, instead of forcing people to use cars if they want to actually reach their destination on time.
And bus connections that drive more often per villages and small towns than once per hour.
That's great, but it displaced more than 150.000 people permanently.
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
"No one died directly from the disaster. However, 40 to 50 people were injured as a result of physical injury from the blast, or radiation burns."
Selective view of the victims?
9 hours ago [-]
lionkor 11 hours ago [-]
Brown coal power kills that many people in a good year directly, not mentioning the long term health effects of exposure to brown coal smoke (even if filtered).
pjmlp 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah people are sniffing lines of coal. /s
Tangurena2 7 hours ago [-]
Based on the number of coal license plates here in KY, yes, they sure do sniff lines of coal.
One almost never sees any of the other 11 black license plates. I do expect that to change as the new (black) firefighter license plates replace the old red ones.
lionkor 10 hours ago [-]
Lol, but really coal power plants are more dangerous work environments, coal mining as well, and then of course there's the pollution (which, opposed to nuclear, isn't bottled up and stored, and instead just exhausted).
LeoPanthera 18 hours ago [-]
The original version is quite different from the version performed today. The original lyrics refer to the pun of "radioactivity" versus "radio activity", meaning, activity on the radio.
The new live version refers almost exclusively to the former meaning, and adds "stop" to turn it into a protest song.
I've seen Kraftwerk live twice, at London's Albert Hall and Berkeley's Greek Theater, both times absolutely amazing. Highly recommended.
I've often thought they would be the ideal band to perform inside the "Sphere" in Las Vegas.
stinos 9 hours ago [-]
both times absolutely amazing. Highly recommended.
Saw them last year in Brussels. And while I agree with this and would go again and would recommend it to others, the side note for me is: I've listened to a lot of electronic music old and new and for my personal taste almost everything Kraftwerk makes is on the mediocre side. I'd never play it at home to listen to. But to see them in concert with pretty nice visuals and at the same time realizing they basically pioneered all of this 50 years ago does remain sort of mindblowing.
FabHK 12 hours ago [-]
Just saw Kraftwerk live exactly a week ago, 2026-05-06, in Hong Kong on their Asia tour. They played Radioactivität, among their other hits. Recommended indeed. There might not be another tour, Ralf Hütter is 79!
This seems like a good post to mention my old friend Laszlo Baksay.
He was part of the original krautrock scene, being a member of the band Dom (see https://dom1972.bandcamp.com/album/edge-of-time , scroll down to the notes at the bottom). If I recall correctly, he went to school with some of the members of Kraftwerk.
Later, he because a particle physicist at CERN. When I was in grad school he was my thesis advisor, while I was doing a project on the measurement of... radioactivity.
nntwozz 19 hours ago [-]
Ruckzuck is way more interesting and ahead of its time (1970).
If the suggested political impact of this music is to be believed, the music might be one of the biggest environmental disasters of all time.
Germany has been pretty widely criticized for decommissioning it's nuclear power program, only to replace it with Russian oil.
lovemenot 19 hours ago [-]
>> only to replace it with Russian oil
with Russian gas.
MomsAVoxell 19 hours ago [-]
s/Russian/American/
Either way, Germany has perfected the efficient foot bullet, at least.
I could imagine Kraftwerk devising a stonkin’ “Fußkugel” track, actually ..
cjpearson 8 hours ago [-]
In 2021, Russia was the source of 52% of Germany's gas. Following the expansion of the Ukraine conflict in 2022 imports from Russia quickly dropped. The biggest suppliers of gas to Germany last year were Norway, Netherlands and Belgium. LNG from the United States and other countries has increased to 10% which is not nearly enough to replace the Russian imports. The phaseout was accomplished by drastically reducing overall gas usage.
Check your facts, please: Germans figuratively shoot themselves in the knee, not the foot ;)
MomsAVoxell 8 hours ago [-]
See also: the back!
:)
lionkor 11 hours ago [-]
Lots of brown coal, which famously emits more radioactivity than any nuclear power plant ever did. The anti nuclear movement is a fucking joke, and the people I know personally here in Germany who oppose(d) nuclear still think the danger is an atomic bomb level explosion, or generational crippling mutations, or losing their house.
Barrin92 19 hours ago [-]
that would be an odd criticism because we never generated any meaningful amount of electricity from oil (and started importing Russian fossil resources 30 years before we turned nuclear power plants off). The chief source for energy in Germany was coal. Gas is primarily an industry and heating input rather than a source of power generation, gas plants have only become more popular in recent years.
What replaced all other fossil fuel sources are renewables, which at 50% are now by far the single largest source of energy.
erickhill 15 hours ago [-]
Saw them last year in Seattle. One of those bands I never thought I'd get the chance to see (I'm 54), but thanks to them they are still touring and making great music.
It was an amazing show, and incredible night.
alanwreath 19 hours ago [-]
Only related in awesomeness but whenever I see VLC’s icon I think of Kraftwerk.
Kraftwerk sounds novel even today, I can’t imagine how it must have sounded 50 years ago.
Fun fact, these "radicals" were behind one of the longest running copyright lawsuits in European history, one that started in 1997 and ended this year https://ra.co/news/85004
teddyh 8 hours ago [-]
I remember thouroghly disliking The Mix (1991). The changed new versions of the old songs were all worse, not better, and especially egregious was the change of Radio-Activity from an etherial hymn about radio communication, to an overtly political activism song about nuclear power.
TitaRusell 8 hours ago [-]
I read once that they wanted Autobahn to be longer but sadly the limitations of the LP was 23 minutes. If only they had access to the CD! What could have been.
Still as it was it must have been a tremendous shock to the hippies of the era. It was the sound of the future.
gchamonlive 8 hours ago [-]
Honest question, why a shock to the hippies? In 69 less than a decade before there was Woodstock and the music, while not futuristic, was very progressive and innovative. All in all I think these folks might have had more to do with the hippies than anyone else at the time, specially in a time right after the world war, with the extreme anti-fascist sentiment in the country.
the_arun 19 hours ago [-]
IMHO Autobahn is still their best.
cmrx64 19 hours ago [-]
The Electronic Harpsichord, same year. must have been an interesting time.
TurdF3rguson 15 hours ago [-]
Totally Rad.
jerkstate 18 hours ago [-]
It’s a shame they were so anti-nuclear. Best song on that album was Ohm Sweet Ohm.
19 hours ago [-]
vanderZwan 14 hours ago [-]
One of the things whose non-existence I'm mildly surprised by: a mash-up between Kraftwerk's Radioactivity and Imagine Dragons Radioactive. Sure, they're extremely different songs melody-wise but that never stopped people from successfully mashing up songs before, and the underlying beat is almost the same but reversed, which is kinda interesting[0][1].
Also, has anyone ever compared the cultural context and zeitgeist of both songs? Probably would be a fun high school assignment, haha. Kraftwerk's song came out in the same decade that the Club of Rome published its Limits To Growth report[2], so when fears about humanity's future really started to become A Thing that was impossible to ignore. Later versions of the song turning it into a protest song encapsulate Cold War fears for a nuclear apocalypse of the time (presumably, I wasn't really around yet back then).
The main audience for the Imagine Dragons song was a generation fully born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One that grew up playing the Fall Out games. It also came out in 2012, right after the 2008 crisis kick-started the "oh the previous generation will leave us with nothing huh?" Doomer mentality among millennials and Gen Z kids. Remember the media going nuts over the "Ok, Boomer" expression for a while? (which still feels like the media intentionally dividing a community to stop it from actually fixing things me, tbh, but let's not get too side-tracked)
In that context, when put side by side the ID song almost feels like a Doomer generation follow-up and implicit critique of how nothing seems to have actually be done about to prevent the impending apocalypse that the Kraftwerk song's generation was supposedly so worried about, turned into a fantasy about living in that post-apocalyptic planet.
It's "vibe" is weirdly hopeful too, especially compared to the Kraftwerk song as well. Instead of fearing an apocalypse, it's set after one and embraces living within it.
At least, that's how the two songs come across to me, which probably says more about me than anything else. Apparently Dan Reynolds, main singer on ID and one of writers of the song, has said that in retrospect after almost a decade, he had realized that it was actually about him "not giving up hope after losing faith in Mormonism."[3]. Which makes sense as a personal experience of going through feeling doomed and figuring out how to survive and embrace living on in a "post-apocalyptic" world on a personal, social level.
I think that's what annoys me about the Kraftwerk song's status as a protest song, and a lot of other music from the same era: it doesn't feel like it's insisting on a better future. It's passive late 70s, early 80s pessimism.
I have been extremely lucky to get an invitation to their concert in Kiev, Ukraine, many years ago. Three of the original members still alive and kicking. It was incredibly awesome.
The concert itself was a gift from Victor Pinchuk, one of the Ukrainian oligarchs and renowned patron, to the city. Previously he also sponsored a full-blown Elton John concert on the main city square which I also attended.
"Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany", by Uwe Schütte. It's packed with details of albums, songs, tours, equipment, and people.
The anti-nuclear message in "Radio-Activity" certainly came later and was repeatedly updated, right into the Fukushima era [2011], but this was not the original sentiment [1976]. From the book:
"At the time, Billboard magazine featured the most-played singles by the large network of radio stations under the heading 'Radio Action'. The band seemed to have misread or misremembered this as 'Radio-Activity'. 'Suddenly,' remembers Wolfgang Flür, 'there was a theme in the air, the activity of radio stations, and the title of 'Radioactivity is in the Air for You and Me' was born. All we needed was the music to go with it. ... The ambiguity of the theme didn't come until later.' Radio-Activity was intended to celebrate radio broadcasting as a convenient, easy and democratic means to listen to music and news."
“Hugo” would appear to be the German equivalent.
Modern grids do not require high-risk investments in ultra-inert baseload power that ultimately fails to find a market; instead, they require low-risk investments in highly flexible power sources, such as batteries or pumped-storage facilities and transmission upgrades, that can capture surplus electricity at low cost (sometimes negativ) and sell it hours later at favorable prices.
The 2036 electricity futures price for Germany is €70/MWh. The break-even point for France’s EDF for old nuclear power plants that had long since been written off financially was at roughly the same level in 2020. Due to rising labor costs, their break-even point is now significantly higher. There were solid economic reasons why EDF was recently nationalized 100%. New nuclear power plant construction in France is a foreseeable economic disaster. Private investors would have fled long ago.
Even the German government has admitted it was a mistake.[1]
Solar generates an abundance of electricity in the summer, but the winter production ranges from tiny to nothing.
The anti nuclear crowd loves looking at buildout graphs and saying we can replace all energy production with solar in x years, assuming energy usage remains the same.
It does not remain the same.
[1]https://www.foronuclear.org/en/updates/news/germanys-chancel...
Certainly a lot of the young wealthy people I know in Europe have AC, even outside of the really hot places.
The cooler parts of the US (e.g. the PNW) are also gradually increasing AC adoption as things heat up, but 20 years ago it was pretty much unheard of.
https://56paris.com/en/cooling-paris-from-below-the-city-s-u...
Most European homes don't have the kind of window that you could stick an AC in, the windows hinge rather than sliding up and down. You can get one of those floor units with a hose for probably ~€300 though.
Meanwhile Chinas 2060 plan for a carbon zero grid with 25% nuclear and 100% over provisioning is right on track.
I think that's a pretty good support for the notion that nuclear is past its prime.
From https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Industry-St...
> According to the China Nuclear Energy Association, despite higher output, nuclear’s share of China’s total electricity production slightly slipped from 4.9 percent in 2023 to 4.7 percent in 2024, (Energy Institute data indicate a 3.7-percent increase in net production and a drop from 4.7 percent to 4.5 percent of the nuclear share).40 The remarkable share decline occurred because China’s electricity consumption grew by 6.8 percent or 627 TWh—significantly larger than Germany’s total annual demand—to a total of over 9,850 TWh, and the country added a combined 357 GW of solar and wind capacity (278 GW and 79 GW, respectively) in the same year compared to just 3.5 GW of new nuclear.41
And from https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/World-Nuclear-Industry-St...
> Targets vs. Reality
> China has dominated global nuclear power development over the past quarter-century, though its ambitious latest Five-Year Plan targets have proven challenging to meet. The 10th Five-Year Plan (2001–2005) put forward a policy of “moderate development of nuclear power,” targeting around 8.6 GW gross operating capacity by 2005,61 with 7.1 GW gross achieved in reality. (All Five-Year Plan capacity numbers quoted hereunder are gross gigawatts). During this period, China connected six new units to the grid—including two French 900-MW reactors at Ling Ao and two Canadian 668-MW CANDU 6 reactors at Qinshan—and completed the development of the CPR-1000, China’s indigenized version of the French M310 900-MW design that would become the workhorse of its early nuclear fleet. The 11th Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) called on China to pursue “an active development of nuclear power” with a target of 10 GW gross operating by 2010.62 With 10.9 GW gross operating at the end of 2010, that target was slightly over-achieved. This period saw the construction starts for Westinghouse’s two AP-1000s at Sanmen in 2009 and AREVA’s EPRs at Taishan in 2009–2010, China’s first Gen III projects. Construction commenced on 29 units, most of which were CPR-1000 reactors. Fukushima’s March 2011 disaster fundamentally reshaped China’s nuclear trajectory during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011–2015). The government imposed a moratorium on new approvals to conduct comprehensive safety reviews. Existing plants and Gen II reactors under construction had to undergo major upgrades including enhanced flood barriers, backup power system overhauls, and seismic reinforcements.63 When approvals resumed, China adopted a strict “Gen III-only” policy requiring passive safety features and core-catchers. Operational capacity reached just 28.7 GW by 2015 versus a target of 40 GW.64 Nevertheless, the period closed with construction beginning on Fuqing-5 and -6 as well as Fangchenggang-3, China’s first Hualong One reactors, representing its indigenous Gen III technology. The 13th Five-Year Plan (2016–2020) aimed for 58 GW operational capacity plus 30 GW under construction while establishing the Hualong One as an exportable technology and advancing systems like the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTR-PM) and fast reactors.65 However, domestic capacity reached only 51 GW by 2020 and 17.5 GW under construction constrained by the ongoing inland reactor ban— a controversy unheard of in other nuclear countries limiting nuclear power plant development to the seashore—and extended construction timelines for Generation III units. In August 2019, the U.S. added CGN to its Entity List,66 citing national security concerns regarding alleged attempts to acquire U.S. technology for military purposes.67 This restricted CGN’s access to certain technologies and affected its international partnerships, including involvement in nuclear projects in the United Kingdom. Later, CNNC was also added to the Entity List.68 The sanctions reinforced China’s focus on self-reliance, accelerating the transition from foreign technologies to the domestically developed Hualong One design. With an operating capacity of around 61 GW as of mid-2025, the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025)69 target of 70 GW operational capacity is out of reach. According to plans, 4.5 GW are scheduled to come online in 2025, but no new reactor started up in the first half of the year. COVID-19 pandemic disruptions to global supply chains, combined with delays caused by mandatory safety upgrades, have created persistent bottlenecks. First-of-a-kind Hualong One projects saw numerous delays (see Figure 23). Meanwhile, plans for innovative projects like offshore floating nuclear power platforms appear to have stalled, with 2023 reports suggesting the program may have been suspended over safety and feasibility concerns.70
It turns out the same has been happening with nuclear, only in reverse: the agencies doing the projections have consistently, year after year, overestimated nuclear growth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...
(in particular figure 3.)
It's not because of hippies or Chernobyl that nuclear reactors never got built. A gas turbine is cheap and simple.
The materials science of turbine blades is awesome. Most materials can't be used above about 1/2 their absolute melting temperature as they become subject to creep. But turbine blades are made with nickel and aluminum (and a carefully optimized mix of alloying elements) that just happen to form phases that become less subject to creep as they are heated (until much closer to the melting point).
The reason (as I understand it) for this is that the intermetallic phase of NiAl prevents migration of single linear dislocations; pairs of linear dislocations are needed to migrate together. But at elevated temperature these pairs dissociate from each other and migration is inhibited.
It was political lunacy, in Sweden and Germany and many other countries.
Miljöpartiet in particular is anti-science and has among the worst environment policies of all major Swedish parties. For example they're working hard to ban spreading sludge from wastewater treatment plants on fields. Apparently phosphors are single-use.
And of course there this gem: https://omni.se/mp-politikern-slosar-resurser-pa-rent-hittep...
The safety issues .. I think the combination of low probability (unknown) and potentially huge cost (Chernobyl affected almost the entirety of Europe!) make it exceptionally prone to toxic discourse. You just can't assign reliable numbers to it. There's a risk of ending up with a Space Shuttle situation, where because a disaster would be so bad everyone in the chain downplays the risk until an O-ring explodes.
Maybe we can try SMRs once they're actually in production, but somewhere else can try them first on their own expense.
Because they require an upfront investment that many households cannot make.
Also, whether such investments make economical sense for companies hugely depends on interest rate, and that fluctuates.
Because of that, a country with a long term goal to decrease dependency on non-renewables may want to subsidize such investments.
I'm pro-nuclear as well, but understand that for many decades the "smart" thing to do was to oppose it. I wouldn't expect a musical artist to have a more nuanced opinion than most of their contemporaries.
I grew up in the 90s and didn't even fully understand what it was, but I remember the fear around it. I remember people in Ireland worrying about Sellafield nuclear power plant in the UK and talking about things like wind direction if there was an incident. And the government posting out iodine tablets to homes.
Anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany was entirely manufactured; it was the product of Gerhard Schröder and similar robots who enriched themselves on Russian oil and gas.
Ironically, it is also where the so-called Green Party began.
The debate has always been about what to do with the waste. Our government misrepresented the "Asse" as a solved solution for a final repository, even though it was always only a test repository for low and intermediate-level radioactive waste. But hubris or corruption led to one scandal after another, forever tainting the discussion about nuclear waste in Germany.
Everything that follows is just a reaction.
My counterclaim to your unsubstantiated take: Pro-nuclear sentiment is what has been manufactured. Anti-nuclear is grassroots.
It's not a 'bad' thing and doesn't say alot about the core movements - it just is what it is.
Nuclear IS a green energy solution.
Where is the peace movement and so-called environmentalism rooted?
Pro-nuclear is pro-environment.
The alternatives are fossil fuels and renewables, which are both extremely anti-environment: water power require large artificial reservoirs and create flood risks, wind power kills/drives away wildlife and is almost useless without efficient large—scale energy storage and other methods of power generation, while solar also requires storage and other power generation but also requires mining of rare earth metals.
Of course we could just stop all of our industries to save power. No more production, no more consumption, no more pollution.
That's not even true, it was Merkel's administration. Under Schröder, the plan for the phase-out was formulated and set in motion, only to be stopped and then restarted by Merkel.
The modern anti-nuclear movement in Germany got started in the 1970's by the TMI accident and a book named "Der Atom-Staat". Chornobyl of course put the nails into the coffin.
Show us some evidence based and peer reviewed studies for your claims. Repeating the same old and scientifically unproved claims doesn’t help.
Just like that Red Army Faction group whose name in hindsight was much closer to the truth than anyone really assumed at the time. At least at some point it clearly was a KGB operation (visits to a certain Dresden office are documented, and yes, guess who was also stationed in Dresden at the time), likely not from the start but quickly co-opted. KGB, as in the service that was built on the experience of how Germany solved their eastern front in WWI through organizing passage from Zurich for a certain dissident.
Yes, those movements were genuine. But they were also directed to some extent. The fictional Tischbier character in Deutschland 83 comes somewhat close to illustrating that ambiguity.
I'm still against nuclear in Germany. I'm fine with Finland doing it.
It had nothing to do with for example chernobyl, where children were not allowed to be outside on the playground for weeks and where you had to pay attention where your food came from and it also has nothing to do that you still have to have the meat of wild boars checked and be careful with eating mushrooms. Totally unrelated.
Seriously, the anti nuclear crowd might have not been rational from the start and still is dogmatic, but it formed exactly, because people did not trust the manufactured state's sentiment of nuclear will provide cheap and clean energy without risk.
Because it is not a clean energy, it is incredibly dirty and dangerous. And those dangers can be handled, if companies and regulators act responsible. But people simply do not trust that they are. And they do have some data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accid...
As further proof of how well that works, Fukushima arrived in 2011: https://www.scribd.com/document/819988755/Examining-Regulato...
Combine that with political decision to put waste into Asse II. Not because it was a good place, just screw with East Germany.
Big demonstration like Brokdorf where around 81. Schroeder begun being a Ministerpräsident in 1990, and 1998 Bundeskanzler.
And naturally the radio waste is fine as long as we store it into other countries.
That’s a catastrophic failure rate under 0.5 percent. Sure, the effects of a failure spread widely and can be a hazard for a long time, but personally I would want to see the same risk-averse sentiment applied to production and use of perfluorinated compounds and fossil fuels, since both of those can spread much farther and cause more of a hazard.
The cherry on top: coal power plants spread significant amounts of radionuclides into the environment.
If we’re talking risk aversion, we can address both the major certain risk of climate change and the lesser but still valid risks of nuclear while saving a ton of money and probably getting results quickly. The reason so much fossil fuel money goes into pushing nuclear power is that it guarantees fossil fuel usage continues unchecked for decades before possibly going down, and we don’t have decades any more.
Batteries are one solution, but the power storage requirements far surpass the world’s capacity for battery production, and come with the same caveats: rare earth metals, which need mining. Mining is a huge source of air pollution, as mining equipment is usually diesel powered, and far worse for the environment due to pollution of natural surface and ground water reservoirs.
Uranium mines have the same issues for sure, the scale is just very different.
Have a look at CATL’s sodium-ion batteries, they do not use anything expensive, rare, or particularly damaging to extract from the environment.
Many forget that while there is plenty of uranium on Earth, most of it occurs in very low concentrations. The lower the concentration, the higher the CO₂ emissions for the entire uranium chain from the mine to the fuel rod.
Meanwhile, renewable energies receive free fuel from the sun. They are already recyclable today and, with intelligent local and intercontinental grids, will also require fewer batteries for storage.
My girlfriends first older brother was one of those babies, the second one survived but is disfigured and needs serious care to live. I had three such kids in my first class at school, four different ones in my second and a sizeable number of parents whose kids didn't survive childbirth. Not being allowed to eat certain mushrooms or digging in the woods was the easier part.
So this may be a bit more tangible for some people than for others.
Ok, maybe not that very last part.
Having enemies the population is afraid of is good for politicians and they'll take any enemies they can find, and they'll do so indiscriminately regardless of the real nuance of the issues.
Immigrants, abortion, this religion or that, rock music, jazz music, alcohol, marijuana, global warming, windmills, books... just whatever as hard as they can regardless of if it's reasonable or not.
It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.
The big problem is having one country be able to do it without deterrents and with impunity. MAD is a good thing, if anyone will have those things at all.
The main natural predator of Americans is other Americans.
There was a pretty good reason to be scared of nukes when these folks were children in the 50s. The world was quite a different place back then. The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking, and Communism was much more expansionary.
Yes, but I think if you asked which country was more likely to "push the button" in the 50s-70s it would have been the US, and the extent to which the US continued invasions after the collapse of the USSR kind of vindicates that.
> The US was lagging behind the Soviets, militarily speaking
I don't think this was ever true except in the least useful measure, raw headcount of conscripts.
Just a small correction, but the anti-vax arguments are very conservative, not liberal.
They may be self described liberal, but their actions certainly aren't.
Anti-Vax people are/were seen the leftist idiots who were anti-capitalist, anti-corpo, anti-the fascist govt, who would rather have died of preventable diseases than perpetuate the medical industry and its capitalist schemes trying to keep us sick to sell drugs and also ban weed.
It's so funny to watch the political sides swap and the doublethink take all of a few days to propogate.
Since antivax is now popular on the right, it has grown into a much larger proportion of the populace. It doesn't help that they now have positions in government.
As a kid I was an anarcho-communist punk rocker but I had a friend who was a christian and his parents were scammy, MLM, right-wing conservative types(think Rush Limbaugh but loonier) who distrusted the government and lied on their taxes. It was obvious how the wings of the political spectrum almost touch at times.
Paranoia and distrust of institutions, mystical thinking, adherence to alternative truth structures.. these are apolitical just as mental illness is also apolitical.
I wish this was true. How many right wing political parties support policies that improve the natural environment? Doing that is the domain of left wing parties, but I’d love to know of any exceptions.
The US EPA was created by Richard Nixon, for example.
Hang on, are we talking about liberal or leftist now?
Because a lot of these hoax "wellness" movements are conservative. Distrusting science and things you don't understand is a conservative mindset.
Do you have examples? People like the Luddites weren't distrusting of technology, they were distrusting of the owners using it to depress wages.
In 2026 this is decidedly a more conservative stance. They installed RFK Jr., who in addition to Wakefield, is the antivax guy. MAHA specifically (can’t believe they actually stuck with that acronym) is overwhelmingly Republican dominated/supported.
The paranoia around nuclear power is tied to generational fear mongering of governments during the Cold War. The oddest part is why not use safer reactor designs; water reactors make sense for the US Navy and not on land.
The estimated cost of making the UK's current stock of waste safe is currently £136bn, for a value of "safe" that leaves at least one of the high level waste pools being at an "intolerable" level of risk of leaking into groundwater until the late 2050s.
For comparison, the estimated cost of achieving net zero in the UK by 2050 is £110bn.
And yet people worry about it and the OP claims it led to the situation in Germany.
Maybe addressing the issue needs to occur, rather than dismissing it?
When the Senate ratified some non-proliferation treaties, that also ended reprocessing spent fuel in the US which gets blamed on Carter.
Notes:
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Curve-Binding-Energy-Alarming-Theodor...
1 - The DOE owns all of the US nuclear weapons and leases them to the DOD.
And Chernobyl. And Fukushima. Nuclear is great but it has some very real risks
1. Radioactive waste gets less toxic over time unlike many toxins like mercury, lead, and cyanide. People seem to emphasize the duration of toxicity for radiation while apparently giving 'forever toxins' a total pass.
2. Short-lived radiation is what's really dangerous. When atoms are decaying fast, they're shooting out energy that can cause real damage fast. Longer-lived radioactive stuff with billion-year half-lives like natural uranium can be held in a gloved hand, no problem. In the extreme, and infinite half life means something is stable and totally safe (radiologically at least).
Yet people still want to emphasize that radioactive byproducts of nuclear power have long half lives. I don't really get it.
The question that matters for both industries is what bad things happen when their stewardship inevitably lapses and the happy path dead-ends.
I don't like either answer, so that heightens the urgency of pursuing alternatives with fewer long-lived hazardous byproducts. Neither coal nor nuclear is an acceptable long term solution.
We did this so that people can buy stock on the market without having to take any responsibility for what they are doing. It's certainly a great funding mechanism, though.
> requiring custodianship on a timescale that humans can barely conceive of let alone commit to or execute responsibly.
This is fearmongering. Casing waste in big concrete casks is enough. It's so incredibly overblown that we're willing to burn coal and kill people over it.
Will it actually get encased successfully, will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move, will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale. Tragedies of the commons are the rule and eventually all of that waste will be go through periods of mishandling at one time or another.
Nuclear power plants have been extremely safe for many decades! Fuck, even the worst disasters related to nuclear power plants have killed less people than coal or oil disasters, even including Chernobyl which was a fuck up beyond comparison.
> Will it actually get encased successfully
Yes, this is literally done and has been done for many decades.
> will it be stored onsite in environmentally sensitive areas because it’s too much trouble to move
What does that mean? You can live 1 feet away from a cask and receive less radiation than you do from the sun.
> will your children’s children uphold the commitments you foisted on them through the political and economic turbulence in their lifetimes, and if not what happens comparatively when those coal ash heaps and nuclear fuel dumps are left to rot…
This is a bad argument because all of society relies on our grandchildren upholding present commitments. What happens if our grandchildren stop upholding the electricity grid? They die. What happens if they stop large scale agriculture? They die. And on and on and on.
> The externalities of concentrated radioactive material are not something that our socio-economic institutions are capable of handling at scale.
It's quite literally something society has been doing very successfully for 50+ years.
Rectang explained it very well, and all their points stand imo.
1 death attributed to Fukushima.
0 deaths attributed to Three Mile Island.
Meanwhile, deaths in the fossil fuel industry total hundreds to thousands every year.
Now before you say "but wait, I've seen estimates of thousands of deaths linked to Chernobyl" - then we must also include all the deaths caused from fossil fuel carbon emissions and radiation emissions, which total in the hundreds of thousands every year.
> You argue it is safe
I do! The fact that a nuclear plant was struck by a tsunami and yet just 1 person died from the radiation fallout is pretty damn amazing. That's about as bad as it gets and yet the result was the same as an oil well accident.
When I was a student I met a Chernobyl liquidator in his 30s on a local train. He said he was dying of leukaemia and looked like it. As a thought experiment, how would you argue to him that his death is unrelated?
Western part of USSR had also an explosion of thyroid cancers and tumors among children. Fortunately it was very treatabe. Because it was screened as a known consequence of the fallout my brother in law had an intervention early.
These are consequences from single incident, for a power source that has minuscule share of generation worldwide. The second similar event had also led to exclusion of substantial territory and only avoided massive health effects due to wind pattern towards the ocean.
And if nuclear proliferated more to geography prone to low safety culture and warfare the toll could up considerably.
Either way nobody argues for replacement of nuclear with coal in this day of age. Renewables are the fastest growing energy sector.
If nuclear became #1 power source and instead of 25 year cadence we had IAEA scale 7 events every 1.5 years, would you still argue it's a net win?
Events like Fukushima would be worthwhile tradeoffs. Events like Chernobyl would not, but that would require nigh non-existent safety regulations.
To put it in layman's terms - I'd much much much rather live right next to a US operated nuclear power plant than a US operated coal plant. In fact I do live rather close to several nuclear power plants.
Im also not against solar or wind, but energy diversity is important for national and energy security purposes
> Worrying about expanding nuclear and ending up putting the waste in a hole deep in the ground is such a nonissue to me.
Blithe minimization of the problem of storing nuclear waste over millenia feels like "Peak HN". :)
("Peak HN" jabs are a cheap shot, though — so let me engage more seriously...)
First, "coal vs nuclear" is a false dichotomy. Everybody I see advocating for nuclear power in this thread is advocating for it as a permanent solution rather than an interim solution — in which case there are other competitors.
Second, if nuclear waste is too dangerous for less-than-ideal storage conditions, that speaks negatively to the viability of nuclear power — because over the long term less-than-ideal storage is guaranteed by our inability to design incentive structures for responsible stewardship that persist over centuries.
Simply untrue. Finland‘s Onkalo is exactly that-a storage solution engineered to require zero stewardship. It is possible and now we know we can do it right. Storage is the weakest argument against nuclear.
By the way, Solar panels and wind turbines contain heavy metals with no decay path, e.g. Cadmium. Nuclear waste at least decays after apprx. 1000 years with spent fuel roughly as radioactive as the uranium ore originally mined for it.
The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me. Especially since nuclear and renewables actually complement each other really well. We can use nuclear for baseload and renewables filling in on top when sun and wind are available.
> The fearmongering against nuclear was always crazy to me.
I sometimes feel similarly about pro-nuclear cheer mongering.
Similarly, while coal ash is nasty stuff that kills lots of people, it lacks many of the qualities that make spent nuclear fuel especially difficult to manage even in small amounts.
For example, a “dirty bomb” made by packing coal ash around conventional explosives would be far less effective than one made from spent nuclear fuel.
Of course pollution looks bad when you have to barrel it, instead of just shitting it out into the environment (atmosphere, etc) and saying "we'll stop doing this in a couple decades, don't worry".
I understand that brown coal isn't what people had in mind when they opposed nuclear; they would rather have wind power, solar power, maybe magical fairy dust, but they didn't consider that, practically, we will stick with brown coal.
We could start by actually having a DB that works, instead of forcing people to use cars if they want to actually reach their destination on time.
And bus connections that drive more often per villages and small towns than once per hour.
Selective view of the victims?
https://secure2.kentucky.gov/kytc/plates/web/LicensePlate/In...
One almost never sees any of the other 11 black license plates. I do expect that to change as the new (black) firefighter license plates replace the old red ones.
The new live version refers almost exclusively to the former meaning, and adds "stop" to turn it into a protest song.
I've seen Kraftwerk live twice, at London's Albert Hall and Berkeley's Greek Theater, both times absolutely amazing. Highly recommended.
I've often thought they would be the ideal band to perform inside the "Sphere" in Las Vegas.
Saw them last year in Brussels. And while I agree with this and would go again and would recommend it to others, the side note for me is: I've listened to a lot of electronic music old and new and for my personal taste almost everything Kraftwerk makes is on the mediocre side. I'd never play it at home to listen to. But to see them in concert with pretty nice visuals and at the same time realizing they basically pioneered all of this 50 years ago does remain sort of mindblowing.
Over the next month, they will play in Ireland and UK, then Eastern Europe. https://kraftwerk.com/concerts/index-concerts.html
He was part of the original krautrock scene, being a member of the band Dom (see https://dom1972.bandcamp.com/album/edge-of-time , scroll down to the notes at the bottom). If I recall correctly, he went to school with some of the members of Kraftwerk.
Later, he because a particle physicist at CERN. When I was in grad school he was my thesis advisor, while I was doing a project on the measurement of... radioactivity.
https://youtu.be/yUFc5QoMG1E
P.S
Also check out Ashra - Deep Distance (1976).
https://youtu.be/BJZ9PVvu9OA
Germany has been pretty widely criticized for decommissioning it's nuclear power program, only to replace it with Russian oil.
with Russian gas.
Either way, Germany has perfected the efficient foot bullet, at least.
I could imagine Kraftwerk devising a stonkin’ “Fußkugel” track, actually ..
[0] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung... [1] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilung...
:)
What replaced all other fossil fuel sources are renewables, which at 50% are now by far the single largest source of energy.
It was an amazing show, and incredible night.
Kraftwerk sounds novel even today, I can’t imagine how it must have sounded 50 years ago.
And stumbled upon a documentary (in German) on Conny Plank: https://youtu.be/YD29GzjiSvw
Still as it was it must have been a tremendous shock to the hippies of the era. It was the sound of the future.
Also, has anyone ever compared the cultural context and zeitgeist of both songs? Probably would be a fun high school assignment, haha. Kraftwerk's song came out in the same decade that the Club of Rome published its Limits To Growth report[2], so when fears about humanity's future really started to become A Thing that was impossible to ignore. Later versions of the song turning it into a protest song encapsulate Cold War fears for a nuclear apocalypse of the time (presumably, I wasn't really around yet back then).
The main audience for the Imagine Dragons song was a generation fully born after the fall of the Berlin Wall. One that grew up playing the Fall Out games. It also came out in 2012, right after the 2008 crisis kick-started the "oh the previous generation will leave us with nothing huh?" Doomer mentality among millennials and Gen Z kids. Remember the media going nuts over the "Ok, Boomer" expression for a while? (which still feels like the media intentionally dividing a community to stop it from actually fixing things me, tbh, but let's not get too side-tracked)
In that context, when put side by side the ID song almost feels like a Doomer generation follow-up and implicit critique of how nothing seems to have actually be done about to prevent the impending apocalypse that the Kraftwerk song's generation was supposedly so worried about, turned into a fantasy about living in that post-apocalyptic planet.
It's "vibe" is weirdly hopeful too, especially compared to the Kraftwerk song as well. Instead of fearing an apocalypse, it's set after one and embraces living within it.
At least, that's how the two songs come across to me, which probably says more about me than anything else. Apparently Dan Reynolds, main singer on ID and one of writers of the song, has said that in retrospect after almost a decade, he had realized that it was actually about him "not giving up hope after losing faith in Mormonism."[3]. Which makes sense as a personal experience of going through feeling doomed and figuring out how to survive and embrace living on in a "post-apocalyptic" world on a personal, social level.
I think that's what annoys me about the Kraftwerk song's status as a protest song, and a lot of other music from the same era: it doesn't feel like it's insisting on a better future. It's passive late 70s, early 80s pessimism.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3viBe2Q0P8
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyXeJZJUFHE
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_of_Rome
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_%28Imagine_Dragons...
The concert itself was a gift from Victor Pinchuk, one of the Ukrainian oligarchs and renowned patron, to the city. Previously he also sponsored a full-blown Elton John concert on the main city square which I also attended.