Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
* demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables and most importantly
* by buying renewables at high prices, helping the manufacturers to get the price of renewables down. I think it's partially thanks to Germany that renewables have become the cheapest form of elecricity generation this fast, with impact observable around the globe!
From that second point alone I think the Energiewende should be considered a success. Could it have been better? Sure. Is it perfect? No. Do I like the high energy prices now? No. But I'm definitely glad we had it.
Also consider that we here Germany in fact do have a nuclear catastrophy right below our feet in the form of Asse 2.
For the public, they know that the endgame is more expensive electricity. No good. For local industry, it basically amounts to taking the increasingly large competitive advantage they have of cheap, low emission electricity and just giving it away to Europe.
People are talking maybe we'll build the next gigafactory for batteries here. There is no shortage of electrochemical industries hungry for that power, and that green image.
Does it really matter to see all those solar panel farms if the end result is they were not much helpful? The money which went into this is absolutely massive and could have been used in a better way to fight climate change.
Short to mid term? Same as above, only that storage will have to be replaced with something else. Since coal is clearly favoured by the system in Germany coal has to replaced by itself. Coal is just the worst alternative. Unfortunately nuclear is no option in Germany, until storage tech is sufficient it could nicely close the gap.
If we are still positive at the five-year mark, that means zero at, say, the ten-year mark, and negative emissions for many decades.
Natural gas has no place in this long-term.
Carbon sequestration is possibly a viable solution. There seem to be solutions in trial (there are numerous questions around it), and even with added costs of capture, it's considerably cheaper and more reliable than other form of energy - moreover, we have it in abundance.
Natural Gas is as viable for the horizon of our future we're able to predict.
In 100 years, every dimension of our tech will have changed so much it's hard to predict. Maybe we solve the nuclear wast problem. Maybe we get fusion. Maybe we have uber cheap solar. Maybe we have dirty easy sequestration. Maybe we have alternatives.
1) Long term storage has some existential risks. Over very long time horizons, these risks become real.
2) Transportation, processing and storage: all of this operational stuff is totally ripe for accidents.
I don't see how that's reasonable, I suggest you might have typed something incorrectly.
There are still quite a number of risks inherent in the Nuclear process that require only a few operational failures for disaster.
If very smart countries and operationally efficient countries like Japan screw up the risks, then anyone can. And that there were mitigating circumstances does not change the fact that Japan still had great governance and scientists and persisted with either risky models or a failure to measure the risk.
Basically, we'd need to suck the risk out of every part of the process in order for it to work well.
I think it's possible.
Again, waste storage is incredibly secure and safe. It wouldn't leech into the water. Nuclear subs have sank into the ocean, and, surprise, there wasn't a global disaster.
In other words it would be good to stop acting as though the only possible grid is one that looks exactly like the one that was developed in the early 1900's. There are many other arrangements of generation resources and economic structures to pay for them than the existing grid. That is what renewables are moving toward.
That looks like progress to me. Why do you say "everyone else is just going to burn more coal?"
Being afraid of government debt if you're a stable country is illogical: it's also why Germany can borrow money at negative interest rates, meaning people would actually rather lend money to Germany and get less back in a few years, rather than park it at a bank. Unlike a business or an individual, the lender has very little risk that the stable country will go bust/get hit by a car and can't earn money to repay the bank.
Take nuclear fusion as an example: Supposedly, this is a case where the projected investments necessary to go from theory to practice just haven't been made. With return of investment only anticipated in the far-off future, it was decided that the money could be spent in better ways.
Surely countries can invest more if those projects are 'more value creating than other investments' and if it's rational, but the notion that countries shouldn't be afraid of debt either is pragmatically no helpful.
All of us are just a few irresponsible financial decisions away from being Greece, Venezuela, Weimar etc.. Stable fiat currencies are a precarious thing, which why we are so cold and 'small c' conservative about it.
As for Germany's problems, it has to do with how we measure value, institutional legacy, and obviously unwillingness to consider Nuclear.
Merkel was never really a pragmatist in the sense we would understand it - she was a political pragmatist, meaning really just 'populist' but more of the centrist type: I believe her Nuclear decision was mostly political.
But I believe people should be reminded from time to time that our world is pretty far from the best possible one: There's no particularly good reason that a child has to die from undernutrition every couple of minutes, that fusion research stagnated due to lack of funding, that people go bankrupt to pay for healthcare, etc. As a species, we're just too stupid and greedy to do any better...
If your case is that economic output is fixed I would flat out disagree. It's been shown over and over again that investment increases economic output. Which was very much the idea with Germany's Energiewende
Otherwise Venezuela would be the richest country in world history right about now, given their inflation rate.
It works identical to mathematical halving in concept. Yes you can keep going, and no you'll never reach zero. However every time you debase the currency to pay for something beyond your budget, you destroy some of the value underpinning it. You make the assets and transactions in that currency less valuable. You can infinitely subdivide the currency, and each time you do it, you destroy more of the value base. Eventually you're splitting pennies, so to speak. This is especially true in cases where you're printing to pay for something you can't afford (almost always the reason for such printing), so what you're really doing is eating the nation's asset base through the currency debasement.
Just ask Japan, they sliced more than 1/3 off their standard of living by debasing the Yen over the past decade. They had no choice due to their debt situation (they needed to stealth default), however it reduces the value of the assets that are held in Yen, making it easier to eg use dollars (or gold) to buy those assets (whether businesses or real-estate and so on).
So sure, in theory can you infinitely print currency. In practical application, you destroy the value of the things that underpin the currency and the whole scheme self-destructs given enough time and 'printing.' That puts a more realistic cap on actual potential money supply. The fact is, it inherently must be finite. Eventually your money is not worth anything, as you destroy the assets under it. As that happens, people stop accepting the worthless currency, it becomes too expensive to 'print' it and support it, and it becomes a self correcting system, in all cases and without exception.
It shouldn't be, but unfortunately, it very much is.
Sure, putting them further into the dry south would certainly have improved yields, e.g. putting them into Spain or even further south like DESERTEC envisioned. And still, they produce a non-trivial chunk of German electricity now. Not sure what you are suggesting, compared to stuff like fusion, we actually know that solar works. Also, there is a political component of having them on own soil: energy independence. A lesson learned in the oil crisis.
Also, despite all the fear mongering that renewables will collapse the grid it proofed to be pretty stable and robust. Even high energy industries like the chemical and processing industry adapted pretty well. Some even actively participate in the energy market now. And in case processes can be slowed down or stopped they buffer energy generation peaks practically serving as some kind of storage.
So, Germany has the opportunity to learn a lot about smart grids in highly industrialized environments. It's just that Germany's track record in these kind of things is, well, bad.
I have a feeling even with the pre-Fukushima plan we would have the same situation now. The thing was that the CDU never committed themselves to the plan. And the energy industry always hoped that one day there will be a CDU-led government that just kills the plan.
So, since the government didn't force them to, they never prepared for the case of the nuclear shutdown actually happening. And when the CDU-led government killed the exit plan it seemed for a short time that their calculations were right. And then Fukushima happened and for the most part we were back to where we were before.
Yes, there was some blind action, but despite stories about all the changes the post-Fukushima plan didn't diverge markedly from the pre-Fukushima plan. Only difference was that the energy companies couldn't hope that a new government will save them since all parties agreed that the exit should happen.
Germany could have had zero CO2 emissions by now, if money were invested into nuclear instead of the current efforts. The declaration to move away from nuclear power was misguided and will be regarded as a huge error in the future.
This deal requires investment at the start but will pay off in the end by lower costs caused by climate change. So what is holding people back? Their perception. They feel like they will die before the impacts will happen. They feel like nobody is doing anything about it so why should they be the first? Humans are built in a way that joining an existing movement is easy but starting one is hard. Germany helped getting the start of the s-curve going.
So basically it looks good to have lots of Solar and Wind, never mind if it actually does anything useful?
It's called Greenwashing, and if people don't stop doing it this planet is going to get worse and worse.
You realize you've basically said that they only success of this project was reducing the price of PV Panels? If that was your goal there are WAY WAY better methods to do that.
> demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables
That's not what it demonstrated though. It demonstrated than even a highly motivated industrialized nation failed in transitioning to clean energy sources.
1) Because it costs a lot of lives. Coal + Lignite in Germany cost 8000 lives per year (funnily everybody also seems to forget that coal release more radiation in the air than nuclear plants). https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/abst...
By contrast Chernobyl was 4000 deaths https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
By not closing 10GW of nuclear production, Germany could have prevented 2000 deaths by year, so in total 20000 deaths over ten years.
2) Because it gave the impression that a carbon free electricity could be achieved by wind and solar alone. This is not the case: first Germany will only close coal in 2038 (in 20 years!!), and plan to use gas to replace coal at least up to 2050. Gas is way better than goal for air health, but it still release a lot of CO2. 2050 is way too late to be carbon free.
The problem with wind and solar is the intermittence: if you look at the data from https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... you will see that on average wind is at 20% capacity and solar at 10% capacity. So even with batteries to smooth things out (which don't exist at the huge scale we are speaking with), Germany would need a lot more solar and wind that it does. For a peak consumption of around 70GW, this mean it would need 350GW of renewable energy. It is so far only at around 100GW, having added 50GW the last ten years. So at this speed it would still need around 50 years. This is without counting the fact that: - the energy stockage problem is at least as hard to solve - solar panel and wind turbines have a lifetime of 20 years, so this does not take into account replacing existing ones - it is getting harder and harder to find place to put them. In 2018 the rate of installation of new renewables slowed down a lot because of this problem.
3) By contrast nuclear cost less, when taking into account this intermittence problem and the cost of interconnection (which is not counted by the figures usually given); it is a lot easier to interconnect a huge centrale than a lot of small ones. But cost is not an argument anyway when we are talking about climate change (if there was a proper carbon tax at least Germany would have closed coal before nuclear).
It is friendlier to the environment (wind turbine kills a lot of birds, and solar panel take a lot of room from wildlife).
It is as safe as solar and wind, and way safer than hydroelectric and coal. Banqiao Dam collapse was 230000 deaths. Yet nobody is calling for stopping hydroelectricity.
Again, Chernobyl was "only" 4000 deaths (high range estimate using a linear model rather than a threshold model are at 10000-20000 deaths), Fukushima was 0 deaths (but 1500 due to the evacuation, including zones where the radiation was the same order of magnitude of the natural one). Chernobyl cannot happen with modern reactors; a Fukushima style incident could, but the nuclear operators increased the security of the points of failures that Fukushima revealed. Again, living near a dam is probably less secure than living near a nuclear plant. And building and installing solar panels and wind turbines cost lives too (as do building dam and nuclear plants, and so on); on average as much as nuclear killed. Yet there is a lot of hysteria about nuclear plants, because an accident is so much more spectacular and visible.
And yes an accident would leave an exclusion zone, but it would actually be smaller than this stretch of no man land (a coal mine in Germany): https://twitter.com/LejeuneXa/status/1124749045996634118
4) I am not saying nuclear fission is a miracle energy (fusion would be). It is as safe as it is in developed countries because of all the regulations, this model would not be applicable in developing countries. For these countries, wind and solar is the way to go, and in this respect Energiewende which paved the way is a success.
There is the problem of nuclear waste, but this frankly this is a (small) problem at the scale of 100s of years, this should not at all be our priority given the very small time frame we have to reduce climate change (the ship has unfortunately sailed for preventing it from being too impactful [aka more than a few million deaths], the real question is whether we limit it to be really impactful or a total catastrophe). This is like worrying about a leak in the sink when the whole house is on fire: bad priorities!
5) But, by making the illusion that 100% carbon free electricity could be achievable without nuclear, Germany set a dangerous precedent. It is not currently possible (as proved by Germany not really reducing its CO2 emissions), it may be possible in 30 years (current prevision is only a cut of 65% in 30 years, the 95% cut is from a very optimistic plan by Greenpeace) but this is way too late.
By refusing to use nuclear for purely ideological# reasons, Germany is depriving itself from a vital tool against global warming. And by vindicating some green movements to call for the closing of nuclear plants along the development of renewable (whereas the sane thing to do would be developing nuclear along renewable: solar panel in sunny places like desert, offshore wind turbines and nuclear plants), it may indeed have done a whole lot of harm. And when we are speaking about the future of human civilisation, this may prove to have been indeed a very costly mistake indeed.
[#] And yes, when you take into account that coal each year kill more in Germany than Chernobyl did globally (and way more than Fukushima); and that even if there was a Chernobyl every 10 years (which cannot happen with the nuclear reactors we have) anyway it would still be a drop of water compared to what climate change is going to bring us, closing nuclear plants can only be ideological.
If you think nuclear power plants don't kill millions of animals per year then you must be living in some kind of fantasy land. Where do you think does the coolant for them come from and where does the waste heat get dumped to?
But in all this we should remember that environmental impact of fossil based electricity is an order of magnitude worse anyway.
A) dumping in the ground and hope for the best
B) some magic tech will pop which will solve the issue.
In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades
and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the
promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to
commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"They apparently don't make economic sense since Uranium is cheap, and there is a risk of proliferation. It's not the case that the technology doesn't work.
You could just keep it in a bunker and pay a crew to dust it off and repackage it when needed for the next 1000 years. But no, for some reason it needs to be taken out of the environment, like in the famous Australian sketch...
EDIT: The business is ugly, not the fact that it is in the UK.
/end sarcasm. Didn’t work out well for Futurama.
Nuclear fuel reprocessing plus breeder reactors. They burn virtually all of the usable power in uranium leaving little waste behind.
It's an economic problem, and an arms control problem, not a technological one.
We should just build a lot of nuclear reactors somewhere in Germany that's hundreds of kilometers from anything we'd care to lose.
The other point is that fact that you need the distance in case the plant blows up. Which implies it can blow up. Which is true as well (unsinkable Titanic, tsunami safe Fukushima, you name it) as technology can and will fail.
As a side note, I once saw an emergency plan for the nuclear power nearby where I life (it is still live). Quite a shock to see that in case of a bad enough emergency nobody would have bothered to evacuate me to begin with. I get the logic, but still kind of shocking.
For real data on how dangerous nuclear energy is, please look at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
That we should IMHO get rid of coal earlier isn't exclusive, so.
There are ways to help solve the waste issues, and ways to make plants safer.
Given the near infinite latent power in nuclear, and the fact that it's Co2 free ... we should probably be considering this strongly and putting a lot of effort into researching it.
The reactor of Chernobyl did blow up. Just not like a nuclear bomb, if that's what you meant. Which may be a bad thing, Hiroshima is actually inhabitable.
>People are unreasonably scared of nuclear energy, and we might lose a planet because of this.
People are quite reasonably scared of nuclear energy. What's unreasonable is that they are less scared of global warming.
Your data is not convincing -- in fact, I think it does not address the danger of nuclear and fossil energy at all. Using fossils kill a fairly predictable number of people each year. For a country, let alone humanity as a whole, that is not a danger but a cost.
Nuclear plants do not "blow up".
Chernobyl was a coal plant them I guess.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1...
The equation does change when taking climate change in account. But that does not mean renewables are preferred to nuclear merely for "political reasons". Being better than coal does not remotely make it acceptable.
What we need is safer fission reactors, preferably unpressurized and without graphite moderator that burns or molten sodium or potassium that ignite in contact with air. Gas leaks. Some molten salts are probably fine, not too corrosive. Water needs to be pressurized but PHWRs (Candu) and smaller PWRs, both US and Russian and French designs have good track records.
buried the lede there
similarily are there significant radioactive isotopes related to the manufacture of plastic products? Regardless if they remain in the plastic or another byproduct? How is such a byproduct dealt with?
There has never been a meltdown of a Gen III reactor, which is the bulk of the fleet in France.
Gen IV are being designed to be impossible to melt down, and, to use waste from other plants as a fuel source. They do not emit radioactive waste.[1]
[0] "To date, there have been five serious accidents (core damage) in the world since 1970 (one at Three Mile Island in 1979; one at Chernobyl in 1986; and three at Fukushima-Daiichi in 2011), corresponding to the beginning of the operation of generation II reactors. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
yet.
> Gen IV are being designed to be impossible to melt down
Fukushima was designed to be tsunami-safe.
Using NPPs risks rendering large areas uninhabitable. Using fossils risks most of Earth. That does make NPPs a better solution in the short term, but relying on them permanently is still madness.
If you look at the compromises made in the design, I don't think you can really say that this was the case. Even if so, all it proves is that maybe we should build such reactors in safer places, not on fault lines near the ocean.
Yes, we can mostly avoid past mistakes. Until there is no accident for a while, people become complacent and start cutting costs. We cannot avoid the mistakes we have neither made yet nor thought of.
Gen IIIs seem to have a short and small operating history. That's helped their success rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...
Gen IV are being designed...
What's the timeline for testing and commercialization of these better-sounding designs? We need tested, proven, and affordable large-scale solutions - now.
As for France, they've managed to keep their problems very quiet for a long time, so ... how could we be sure? http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/dudzinski2/
Putting safety concerns to one side, the many, many costs of nuclear are not getting lower.
I thinkits easy to politically argue for nukes. They are like planes, when they crash it's a big deal, still comparatively safest method.
I am not a fan of mass producing waste that renders some area or space inhabitable for most of life, for longer than our written history or even our species. Though, maybe it's better than burning fossils as a mean of getting to something cleaner and safer (and cheap). Tough choice.
I think i'd nuke waste and some disasters over greenhouse I guess, especially runaway.
Unlike solar and wind, the tides are very predictable and 2 cycles per day are guaranteed.
The constant false dilemma between nuclear and coal is poisoning the discussions and blinding us from investing in alternatives...
Did the Japanese project for tidal energy get scrapped? Wikipedia is mute about the current status at [1] and doesn't list the Japanese tidal energy project as under construction at [2] either...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan#Ocean_energy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tidal_power_stations
I think the history is one of a failed economic subsidy program that accidentally accelerated the PV-industry by a few years.
There were several growing PV manufacturers in germany up to around 2011/2012. In that timeframe the manufacturers were all busy building new factories, but the government noticed that the subsidy program became large enough to be expensive and suddenly severely cut the subsidies. None of the manufacturers survived that, the remains were sold to the chinese.
2002 2018
Total 503 545
Coal + Oil 253 205
Gas 40 44
Nuclear 156 72No reason not to complete the picture, I guess:
2002 2018
Total 503 545
Coal+Oil 253 205
Nuclear 156 72
Gas 40 44
Biomass 4 45
Wind+Solar+Hydro 39 177
Other 10 3There are actually good books that explain how all this works, why there are also short term "unsuccessful" years and how about everything will benefit in the end. And, most importantly: why the Energiewende actually enables a comfortable, good life.
I gave it to many friends so they can educate themselves about the topic.
The French can be proud today, consuming electricity with 1/6 of the carbon footprint per kWh, compared to electricity in Germany. And paying half the price, too, compared to what electricity costs in Germany.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192091...
Fission is a pointless, dirty, expensive technology when it comes to power generation on Earth. It is also not that friendly to the environment once you consider the huge infrastructure you have to operate. But the worst thing is that it is not scalable. Think about exchanging all coal and gas power plants with nuclear reactors, consider the safety and proliferation issues and then tell me that PV with chemical storage is not much simpler solution.
Until we've gotten rid of coal shutting down nuclear and delaying decommissioning of coal to take up the slack involves causing mass death.
Coal is only 'acceptable' because the consequences are not as immediately visible.
PV might well be a better option once we've shut down all fossil fuel plants but in the meantime shutting down nuclear is irresponsible and immoral if it delays decommissioning of other types of plants.
Chernobyl's unit 4 was destroyed by an explosion.
Fukushima had multiple explosions that destroyed the upper levels of reactor buildings, and ruptured the containment of unit 2.
During the three mile island accident there were several days where engineers were sweating bullets because there was a hydrogen gas bubble at the top of the pressure vessel, and they were afraid it would explode. It was only after about a week of effort that they were able to eliminate the H2 bubble.
Every nuclear reactor has the possibility of immense damage due to explosion - steam explosions, explosive gas, and secondary systems such as diesel and electrical system. It is one of the primary hazards that control systems and emergency cooling and venting are there to deal with. Lying to everyone that it's not possible isn't helpful to the nuclear community.
I do not know how to respond politely to such a ridiculous statement.
To clarify: “great” is no absolute, an NPP that generates electricity is obviously better than one that explodes. It also depends on the size of the explosion. A Hiroshima-class explosion would be acceptable, the one of a tsar bomb might not be. Also an NPP that fails like that would still kill its operators and perhaps some unlucky farmers. But compared to the actual worst case, that's negligible.
In terms of existential threats to human life as we know it, it is.
The choices aren't "renewables and nuclear" or "renewables and ponies and magical unicorns." The choice is what proportion of energy do we want from nuclear vs renewables vs fossil fuels.
The best option is reducing energy requirements. After that, though, a large proportion of every unit of nuclear energy you ban goes straight to fossil fuels. Which is death.
And a nuclear accident would not involve closing the whole country, it would involve an exclusion zone of 10-20 km (Fukushima exclusion zone is 20km, but it include zones where the residue radioactivity is <50 mSievert, way less than some natural radioactive places), a whole lot of economic damage (but negligible compared to climate change), and between 0 and (at worst) a few thousand deaths.
German plants are old. There's issues with a few of them. Decommissioning them seems inevitable. The question is whether building new nuclear plants, at probably about 15+ years for the first plant to start operations, is really a better option than investing in renewables?
I am not saying that Germany should invest in nuclear instead of renewable, but in nuclear along with renewable. And yes 15 years is a long time, but still a lot less long than 30 years (and Germany lost 10 years by being stubborn about nuclear).
And other countries that want to do a energy transition should not make the same mistakes as Germany. And political parties in France that want to close nuclear plants are environmentally severely misguided.
Not sure about the whole world, but Germany definitely has one of highest prices for elctricity in Europe:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
That's not what I was arguing with. Your statement about "they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices in the world" is just terribly untrue.
That has to stop. Power generation cannot grow exponentially forever