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Energy and Environment
Published in T.M. Aggarwal, Environmental Control in Thermal Power Plants, 2021
Renewable electricity supply in the 20–50+% range has already been implemented in several European systems, albeit in the context of an integrated European grid system. In 2012, the share of electricity generated by renewable sources in Germany was 21.9%, compared to 16.0% for nuclear power after Germany shut down 7–8 of its 18 nuclear reactors in 2011. In the United Kingdom, the amount of energy produced from renewable energy is expected to exceed that from nuclear power by 2018, and Scotland plans to obtain all electricity from renewable energy by 2020. The majority of installed renewable energy across the world is in the form of hydro power.
Nuclear safety by numbers. Probabilistic risk analysis as an evidence practice for technical safety in the German debate on nuclear energy
Published in History and Technology, 2020
Stefan Esselborn, Karin Zachmann
The very next day, taken aback by what could have proven a major setback for the expansion of nuclear power in Germany, RSK experts and ministerial representatives held a crisis meeting at the BMI. In light of the Wyhl decision, even Lindackers had to admit that the concept of risk was evidently ‘hard to get across to the public’, which was used to the promise of absolute safety.100 Still not ready to abandon the probabilistic approach, he proposed to solve the problem by establishing legally binding thresholds for acceptable additional risk. For his colleagues, however, this came dangerously close to officially accepting the death of innocent citizens, which they thought politically unfeasible and possibly even unconstitutional. In their view, ‘the risk concept’ was simply ‘not enforceable’.101 Instead, the RSK experts immediately reverted to deterministic thinking and re-centered their argumentation around a new concept, which soon came to be called ‘basic safety’. German manufacturers, they now claimed, had reached such a high level of production standards and quality control that a bursting reactor vessel could be completely excluded as a possibility.102 Only days later, the Schweinfurt administrative court, deliberating an analogous lawsuit against the planned power station at Grafenrheinfeld, declared itself convinced by this new line of argument. It ruled that an additional burst protection was not necessary, and thus provided the desired precedent for overturning the Wyhl decision.103