Comment by Gondolin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Gondolin | Hacker News Reader

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> Because it wanted to get rid of nuclear first and as fast as possible.

And this killed a few thousand persons and rejected MegaTons of CO2 in the atmosphere that could have been avoided.

> The next two decades will bring the end of coal-based electricity.

This is 30 years later than could have been, and gas instead of coal is not the solution either. Will Germany have 100% renewable in 20 years?

> When do you stop going to vacations via airplanes? Stop eating meat? Stop driving a car?

I changed my way of living already. I could still do more yes, but the most efficient way would be to convince policy makers to close coals/gas before nuclear.

> No, nuclear and renewable are not compatible. Nuclear is centralized monopolistic, mostly state-owned form of energy. I sucks up huge amounts of investments and corrupts everything around it.

Again, the drawbacks of nuclear power are nothing compared to the drawback of climate change, and gas corrupts too.

>Will Germany have 100% renewable in 20 years?

Probably yes. They seem to be poised to get there quicker than anybody else.

The inhibition to us achieving this goal earlier wasn't a lack of faith in nuclear power - it was a lack of belief in the importance of dealing with climate change at all.

Moreover (and this is the critical part), it's not like nuclear power is going to get us to 100% renewables any quicker than solar/wind will at this point - not since they broke the cost barrier in 2014.

In the 1980s nuclear was the only way to go zero carbon. 10 years it would have helped us get there quicker. Since 2014, there's no real point to building out nuclear capacity any more - new nuclear can't compete on cost only rickety old plants can.

> Again, the drawbacks of nuclear power are nothing compared to the drawback of climate change

One Fukushima or Chernobyl scale event in a densely populated country like Germany on a densely populated continent like Europe? Having reactors with molten cores near my home town with a 5 mill people metro area?

Japan had massive luck that the wind wasn't blowing in the direction of Tokyo.

Chernobyl: cannot happen.

Fukushima: how many deaths? Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?

But sure, let's close the nuclear reactor who killed nobody in Germany, and keep open the coal plants which still accounted for 228TWh in 2018, meaning they killed around 22800 persons per year. And let's only close them in 2038, 30 years later, having wasted 350 Million Tons of CO2 by year and killed hundreds of thousands of people in total.

We are lucky that the gas lobby is way less evil than the nuclear lobby <https://twitter.com/Senficon/status/1110278976654794753>

I said 'scale of an accident'.

> Even if the wind was blowing in the direction of Tokyo?

Millions of people trying to escape...

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