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Comment by Faaak | Hacker News Reader

Exactly ! If the problem is Climate Change (and thus CO_2 production), why would you, in your sane mind, shut down nuclear power ? It's the best method to produce electricity with the less grams of CO2 per kwh..

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Because the anti-nuclear mindset is too strong in Germany. We are still affected from the Chernobyl disaster (still can't eat wild boar, still can't eat mushrooms from certain areas). The nuclear waste problem is also not solved and extremely expensive. Then there is politics: Nuclear plants lifetime was extended, then Fukushima happened and "overnight" lots of old plants were shut down.

Germany is at 14% nuclear, 30% coal (even though all national coal mines have closed), 10% gas, 46% renewable (wind, solar, bio-gas, water, all without proper energy storage)

> even though all national coal mines have closed

If only. It's just hard coal mines that were closed. Lignite is still being open-pit mined.

> The nuclear waste problem is also not solved and extremely expensive.

You could do what coal plants do with their nuclear waste: incinerate it and distribute it on the wind.

I agree, looking at long term health, injurys and deaths. Coal is the worst and Nuclear the best source of energy. https://ourworldindata.org/what-is-the-safest-form-of-energy

Personally I would like to see new and safe Nuclear power plants in Germany, preferably using what is now considered nuclear waste as fuel.

Wow wait where can't you eat mushrooms from? This is new to me as a European.

The bavarian forests are partially still strongly contaminated in the ground. As a result, certain species of mushrooms can collect radioactive contamination. And wild boar likes to eat mushrooms, so can be even stronger contaminated over time. In general you can eat mushroooms and wild boar, but it is recommended to do so not too regularly, if they come from one of the stronger affected parts.

There are also restrictions on livestock and game in Northern Europe, in areas from Britain to Finland.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidnikel/2019/06/08/chernobyl...

I've never heard that either. Can't be correct.

"I've never heard of it, so it can't be true" is a terrifyingly bad standard to set.

https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush...

> As a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident, certain species of mushrooms and wild game are still highly contaminated with caesium-137 in some areas of Germany.

Highly contaminated is a strong word. You'd have to eat 20kg+ of those mushrooms according to that article to reach your annual recommended amount of radition for the year. Considering how long it would take to pick 20kg of wild mushrooms I think you would be at it for a while.

Bananas are also radioactive - those mushrooms maybe an order or two of magnitude more.

20 kg doesn't sound too much at all. I know some people who pick a few dozen buckets of mushrooms every year.

I've just made an Ottolenghi recipe-based mushroom lasagne with 2.4 kg mushrooms the other week. Eaten over two days, very delicious and wouldn't mind it more often.

> wild boar

Where's that? Eating wild boar is quite common in Germany. I'm not sure if I'd eat imported wild boar from the Ukraine but never heard of issues with German wild boars.

https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/33-jahre-nach-tschernob...

'In south Germany there are regions where 20% of the wild boars are radioactive contaminated. The meat is not allowed to be sold.'

If you account for waste disposal it becomes prohibitively expensive. In 2016 the largest German utilities agreed to pay €23.6bln so that it would be the government's problem to deal with the waste:

https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d...

Decommissioning all the (23) plants still active in 2016 will eventually cost another €24bln.

All in all €2bln per plant. And this is just the lower bound. It's hard to tell how much safely storing this waste will cost over the next several decades.

I remember this from my German lessons in school. Managing radioactive waste is simply too troublesome.

It's way more expensive than coal, wind or solar. And since the German government doesn't seem to subsidize anything except coal, nuclear has no chance.

An already up and running nuclear power station is not at all that expensive.

They are uninsurable, which means if someone actually had to pay for the insurance their price would be astronomical.

The fact that they've been running for decades is hard to explain if that's true.

Risks had not been factored in as likely (like in Japan the authorities have demanded protection against earth quakes and tsunamis, but only to a certain level and they were surprised to learn that over the lifetime of these plans stronger events happen than anticipated) and if anything happens, the companies are simply not insured - other than via the government, which had created the demand and the environment for these reactors. The companies are also not well prepared if larger accidents happen.

Example: Many old reactors never were designed to withstand an impact of a large passenger airplane.

Large passenger airplanes don't fly into buildings. Right? Well, we have learned in the meantime that this scenario is not that unlikely, since 9/11 and for example the Lufthansa/Germanwings pilot, which flew an Airbus into the ground in France killing all passengers on board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

One could now just let these old reactors run. What to do with the risk? Well, set up military systems to shoot down aircrafts approaching a reactor site? Adding more concrete as a protection? I'd guess that there were some clever people exploring the options and in the end its just to costly to do something working...

That's extremely easy to explain. They are expensive and therefore nobody wants to be the scapegoat that is responsible for hundreds of billions of lost tax dollars unless a convenient event like Fukushima offers an excuse.

Isn't this more about self-sufficiently powering the country?

I mean, Germany would have to buy uranium.

We need to buy coal and gas also. Closed down all the coal mines, and coal is the only resource Germany has in its territory. We are very dependent at the moment.

We are at 46% renewable energy, but without proper storage that's just a sad book-keeping trick.

Currently there is not much reason to store electricity in large amounts, since there is not that much surplus electricity in Germany. Storage will become relevant after 2030 or later. Means we are still in the stages of R&D and planning.

R&D remains just R forever if you postpone deployment until R&D is "done", whatever that means. As a lone consumer you can let others be early adopters, but this approach is not applicable to the national economic policy level. None of the progress in renewables we saw in the last three decades would have happened with only research spending, no matter how generous. Funding research is important and immensely helpful compared to not funding research, but it can only get you so far.

Germany has been neglecting storage with the argument "but we don't need it yet" for far too long already and is already starting to suffer chicken/egg problems as a consequence. "Why build more renewables if we can't store the energy anyways" is heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists.

There is simply no need for mass deployment, yet. We would waste a lot of money. If there are business models, which make the existing storage profitable, then it gets viable.

For example near my home town there is a pumped hydro storage facility, which the last years struggled economically.

It's also useful to distribute electricity over several countries via a grid designed to do so - something which starts for countries around the North Sea.

It's not that nothing is done. For example North Germany builds a 1.4 GW HVDC line to Norway (called NordLink) to be able to store and retrieve electricity from&to there. Additional lines can be added, and at least one is in the planning stage (called NordGer). One of these lines costs 2 billion Euros to be build.

We are also far away from having infrastructure to use electrical vehicles as a grid component - there are simply also not yet enough of these vehicles. Recycled batteries from these vehicles could be used in homes. There is a compressed air power plant running for decades. There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity. There are first deployments of storage systems using heat, in the industry.

I would expect that more storage variants and mass deployment will start in a decade, once we reach interesting levels of cheap surplus electricity, there is large scale demand for stored electricity, and when there are viable business models.

> heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists

I would not invest billions into storage deployment, just because populists are unhappy.

> There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity.

Only with power to gas conversion capacity. Which is exactly what this project is trying to ramp up to practicality. "You should not do X because you could do X instead" isn't a very compelling argument.

There are a bunch of power-to-gas projects. It's already being done. But there is very little experience on a large scale industrial level. We are just starting to work on that.

https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/energiewende-pete...

> Bis 2030 sollen 20 Prozent des in Deutschland verbrauchten Wasserstoffes aus nachhaltigen Quellen wie Wind- und Solarkraft stammen.

In 2030, 20% of the Hydrogen used in Germany should come from renewable sources...

What makes you think that this Spiegel link isn't talking about the exact same thing as the original article on rechargenews.com ? The latter just happens to be slightly more specific, singling out one project (likely the most concrete plan within a bigger initiative) wheras the Spiegel from two days earlier remains high level.

Correct, and it makes it again clear that this is currently not about storage, but about production of Hydrogen on a level which is mostly for consumption: vehicles, industry, heating, ... Since 20% share of renewable generated Hydrogen in 2030 is not much, scaled storage applications won't come into focus before the next decade.

With 'storage' I'm talking about systems which can provide electricity for the grid (or consumers) when other renewable sources (wind, solar, ...) are currently not available in sufficient capacity.

But methanization is part of the project and the storage of methane is both solved and deployed at scale (e.g. current German gas consumption could be served for months entirely from storage) and includes a massive x-to-electricity component (conventional gas power stations). The fact that is both storage and direct application only makes this project better than anything that's exclusively one or the other.

> methanization is part of the project

That does not mean that there is currently any business model for it, for example because it is extremely expensive. Technology will be applied in scale, when there is a need for it, when it is affordable and when it is price competitive with other solutions.

Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first. There is still uranium in the Ore mountains. The USSR and GDR were mining it.

> Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first.

The mines are closed.

Germany is currently investing billions to clean up the Uranium mines. Wismut might have cost then around 8 billion Euro. The technical and environmental standards of the USSR and the GDR were rather poor. Left is some Uranium, which too costly to mine and not competitive in any way with the world market.

Germany is a rich country. It can afford to import things.

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