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Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

The Energiewende is actually one of the reasons I still live in Germany: I want to see how it happens. It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of. And by the way, private energy consumption is heavily taxed (for a good reason), yet energy hungry industries are exempt from it. And they feel the effect: because of the growing effect of the renewable energies, they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices in the world.

There 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.

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> It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of.

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...

Not only that but their move to renewables will be more hassle free as they have enough base load power to compensate for lack of wind and sun, more shoreline and sunnier areas south of Bordeaux.

No, it won't. To compensate for the fluctuating energy output of solar and wind, you need storage and plants that can be throttled quickly, not nuclear reactors that pretty much can't.

CO2 is not the only thing that counts. One of those "clean" nuclear plants blows up and we can essentially close our countries or all die of cancer.

> CO2 is not the only thing that counts.

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.

Energiewende is no ponies and magical unicorns, it is a quite well thought out system to about zero CO2 ouput in 2050 (except some industries like steel production where fossils will be needed for some time to come until better chemical processes are found). 2050 is not the number that "Fridays for future" want to hear, but still ambitious enough to really make a difference. A lot of new infrastructure has to be built (and is currently built) and paid for (that is why I gladly pay my 28,9 cents/KwH). It is a giant project, but mostly it is using technology we know and can use today. We just have to scale it.

No it is not zero CO2 output in 2050 but about 65% reduction only, or 80% if a 25% reduction of electricity consumption is achieved. This is 1) too late, 2) not even on par with France's electricity C02 production.

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.

When you put it this way, you might as well say that a major accident that takes out half of Western Europe would be neglige in comparison.

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?

Again, a major accident would not take out half of Western Europe, this is fear mongering. A major accident would be severe, with a large exclusion zone and a lot of economic damage, but sill kill less than coal kill in Germany each year. And Germany was still constructing new coal power station in 2018!

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.

Nuclear plants do not "blow up", at least not the ones that are built after Chernobyl. Please stop spreading FUD.

Fukushima did blow up. Saw it live on TV. In fact, anything that creates that much thermal energy in a pressurized environment has a chance to blow up.

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.

You can blow up a Chernobyl type nuclear plant a year and it'd still be better than coal.

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.

Why do you keep posting this lie?

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.

They do not blow up in the sense of a nuclear explosion. It's a normal explosion. With normal consequences.

When you blow up a bunch of radioactive material in a large steam explosion you get widespread contamination from fallout and a massive cleanup necessary to recover the scattered material, as well as dealing with the melted core material. That's not "normal".

They blow up in the sense of a dirty bomb. That's a lot worse. It would be great if NPPs just blew up in a nuclear explosion! We could safely use them by making the blast radius a forbidden zone.

> They blow up in the sense of a dirty bomb. That's a lot worse. It would be great if NPPs just blew up in a nuclear explosion! We could safely use them by making the blast radius a forbidden zone.

I do not know how to respond politely to such a ridiculous statement.

Then please explain impolitely where you think I'm wrong.

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.

They blow up just like a pressure cooker blows up. If we build an unpressurized reactor with unflammable coolant, nothing ever blows up.

Tell me about it and tell me why they seem to be no alternative.

> yet energy hungry industries are exempt from it. And they feel the effect: because of the growing effect of the renewable energies, they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices in the world.

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...

You are not contradicting what I said. Consumers pay a lot (and always have). I said that energy hungry enterprises are exempt from it.

> I said that energy hungry enterprises are exempt from it.

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.

I just looked up the 2015 numbers for you (I do not have newer data at my desk right now, but the number for Germany is supposed to shrink). In USA and France, energy hungry industries pay 4 cents/KwH, Germany pays 5 cents, China 6, UK 8 and Japan 12. As said, consumers pay more than in most or all other countries. But due to more energy efficient technologies, the actual percentage of income that is paid for electricity stayed about the same.

Which books are you referring to? I’m interested...

Read this one and it is a compact, very well written book: Energiewende verstehen: Die Zukunft von Autoverkehr, Heizen und Strompreisen https://www.amazon.de/dp/3662577860

I gave it to many friends so they can educate themselves about the topic.

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