This is rather surprising, and also not. On one hand, it makes sense that a European (see: Rich and believes in climate change) country wouldn't want to frack under their own soil (I'm not against fracking but I am also happy it is banned here in New York) but fracking can certainly be done safely effectively if the right regulations are in place and enforced.
The only reason we see so many bad cases of fracking effects like earthquakes and so on is because the states that allow fracking also don't bother to regulate it. So it's just a matter of extra cost and engineering, which can decrease that relative cost over time.
Besides, if anyone can engineer themselves out of a problem, it's the Germans.
Russians have the greatest incentive for this ban, since they supply 1/3 of Germany consumption. Fracking has lowered the prices of oil and gas which is the greatest threat to stability of Russian Federation.
In Germany by law every car needs to inspected every two years by the TÜV. Cars are highly regulated in terms of what modifications you may perform on them and anything even slightly significant requires approval.
If you want to sell a car at decent value or you're leasing it, you're practically required to also perform the inspections offered by manufacturers.
When well-maintained and regularly serviced is the norm, it's inevitably going to influence your design.
That's part of it, but it doesn't quite explain the front suspension on a BMW bike. No one else makes a suspension so complicated, however, no one else has a bike that doesn't dive under braking. The engineers knew it was possible and pulled out every stop to deliver it.
It's a cultural thing, when we see a problem it must be fixed no matter how much complexity.
It's like when I'm making an app and there's a 5 fps drop when the a new table view cell is rendered, everyone I show can barely notice it, but I see it, and it bothers me until it's fixed. 60 FPS or GTFO.
> In Germany by law every car needs to inspected every two years by the TÜV. Cars are highly regulated in terms of what modifications you may perform on them and anything even slightly significant requires approval.
Is this a German thing or an EU thing?
Because in Spain you have to pass the ITV every to years until the car has 10 years and then, every year.
And almost any modification has to pass that inspection
The German regulation has existed for a long time, I doubt that's due to the EU. However you want to be able to sell and drive a everywhere in the EU. It only makes sense to deal with this on a EU level to harmonize existing regulation and force members lacking such regulations to implement it. If that hasn't happened already (which I find hard to believe), it will.
Every(?) European country has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_inspection of some kind. Turkey adopted the German system last year. I wouldn't be surprised if the EU standardises the regulations at some point in the future.
It's not at all surprising. Germany has for decades now been very environmentally conscious. This is why Germany is doing the Energiewende and have had plans to shut down nuclear reactors since long before Fukushima.
Given fracking in the US as an example, it's no surprise at all that you'd find broad support for heavy regulation or a ban of fracking.
What's surprising about this is that it took so long.
Oil isn't a big industry in Germany, this is like Canada banning slaughtering of monkeys for palm oil, purely political, no one in Canada is going to have to shut down their palm orchards.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but nuclear reactors have nothing to do with climate change. Reading GP then your reply seems ambiguous about the "environmentally conscious".
He does not mention climate change at all. Germanys antinuclear movement is against nuclear reactors because it is still unclear what happens to the waste. Remind you that were are speaking of a country that is populated quite evenly, there is no space where you could leave it for ever with noone affected. Same for fracking: somebody will live in the area where fracking occurs. But big money does not care about these people. Therefore Germans are against it altogether.
Waste disposal is almost entirely political. That Germany is shutting down the objectively cleanest reliable source of energy is tragic.
All of the nuclear waste Germany generates would fit in a single football stadium. Technically you'd pick something below the water table and geographically stable, like say, a salt mine.
Burning coal produces more nuclear waste, it just dumps it all into the atmosphere.
Nuclear waste disposal is a serious issue. But compared to burning fossil fuels for energy, it's by far the lesser of two evils.
Most of the more dangerous fission products will have decayed sufficiently to be "safe" after hundreds, or thousands of years. Nowhere near a million!
Anything that lasts longer than that emits so little radioactivity that it's pretty much background noise.
There are plenty of naturally occurring sources of radiation that are strong enough to be dangerous - like Radon in Cornwall, UK. Even if a future civilisation accidentally digs up one of our waste sites in a few thousand years time, it wouldn't really be any worse for them than digging up some natural radioactive source.
> it wouldn't really be any worse for them than digging up some natural radioactive source.
Really? That would be mostly oxidized uranium - white not really harmless it's something different than highly toxic plutonium - besides that you have extremly toxic decay products that e.g. pose a problem for the chernobyl area.
Besides that there are more than enough isotopes used in nuclear energy that have a half-life of millions of years.
If you look at the history of Europe in the past 2000 years it's not exactly been peaceful - also something to consider - especially as we have the knowledge to use nuclear reactors to weaponize this waste.
Nuclear waste shouldn't contain plutonium. That stuff is expensive, so there's an economic incentive, as well as environmental, to reprocess waste and recover any remaining fuel.
Chernobyl (and Fukushima) are entirely different (and much worse) because you do have the nuclear fuel itself being exposed to the environment. But waste fission products in a modern reactor are far less dangerous compared to the fuel that goes in, especially once they have been properly reprocessed and then stored for while.
Isotopes with half lives in the millions of years, as opposed to years or decades, really aren't all that dangerous in terms of radioactivity. Longer half life generally means less radiation.
While I agree that waste disposal is a solvable problem in the technical domain, I'm not so sure anymore that it is solvable in the political domain. Too much things have gone wrong there because of political shenanigans.
It may work in a dictatorship, where the will of the people (those who are close to the waste storage) can be ignored. But if I have the choice between nuclear power and democracy, my choice is clear.
In the US, it's a different discussion, mainly because you have large stretches with only few voters.
You're right. However in Germany environmental and anti nuclear groups are basically one and the same. The German Green Party has evolved out of the anti nuclear movement and forced all other parties to adopt environmental and anti nuclear policy.
Shutting down nuclear reactors, like the Energiewende, is a great example for the kind of power these groups have in German politics. That's why I mentioned it, to illustrate the power they have and that it's therefore not surprising that fracking would be banned.
The only reason we see so many bad cases of fracking effects like earthquakes and so on is because the states that allow fracking also don't bother to regulate it. So it's just a matter of extra cost and engineering, which can decrease that relative cost over time.
Besides, if anyone can engineer themselves out of a problem, it's the Germans.