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Comment by jakub_g | Hacker News Reader

I'm rather a noob in the topic, but I've been reading in recent months about energy market and it seems like a collective insanity in the light of the climate crisis.

- In most(whole?) Europe, electricity used by trains is taxed higher than jet fuel used by planes (legacy measure from decades ago which was meant to boost air market; of course now it's hugely difficult to change it)

- Germany went strongly into renewables which is laudable, but CO2 footprint barely changed, because...

- Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal. In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants.

- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions, and this is the last thing that we want at this time. But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2.

Am I missing something or this is total madness?

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>Am I missing something or this is total madness?

You're not missing anything. This is madness.

Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm.

Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.

> Nuclear power is the only solution.

How much energy storage do we need to not need nuclear? That seems to be an assumption you're making that I'm not actually familiar with.

That's the wrong question. The right question is how much time do you think the grid should be offline each year?

It's a simple question no renewable proponent wants to talk about because it makes their whole case indefensible.

Renewables plus transmission plus storage plus gas generation is easily as reliable as the generation mix we have now.

Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently.

So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2 to make a mass extinction inevitable by 2100.

Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?

mass extinction inevitable by 2100

This is very emotive language, which is fine, but there is no currently projected scenario where mass extinction is inevitable or even likely.

Great, but we don't have the transmission, storage or gas generation currently.

We are well on the way. In many parts of the world this is the majority energy mix already.

So we need to spend trillions to build a system that still produces enough CO2

This is untrue. It's roughly the same cost as replacing coal stations with new coal stations, which is roughly ten times cheaper than replacing them with nuclear. And it cuts energy production C02 production by about 70% which is easily enough to meet most targets to stabilise the climate.

The poster said ‘a mass extinction’ which does not mean what you seem to think it does: “An extinction event (also known as a mass extinction or biotic crisis) is a widespread and rapid decrease in the biodiversity on Earth.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event

It seems very fair - even overly cautious! - to push the inevitability of that out to 2100 when many would say it is already in progress.

You are right of course.

However the OP said (in their original post): In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.

I took it in that context. I'd also note the there are multiple causes of mass extinction of which climate change is one.

Well, what else are you going to suggest? Obsolete monolithic nuclear plants? Pro nuclear activists don't actually know the trade offs between nuclear plant designs and the inherent problems that are caused by "super projects". It's just a pet peeve to differentiate themselves from the "green hippies".

Where are all the modular reactor factories that the nuclear industry needs? Why is everyone focusing on one shot construction of nuclear infrastructure instead of keeping it alive by periodically replacing existing reactors?

Let me describe the way nuclear power plants have been built. Company E wants to build a power plant. It cannot take advantage of an old design because those have been declared unsafe. They only want to build a single one but they are forced to make a custom design. The custom design costs hundreds of millions in R&D before it can be approved by the government. Afterwards the company has to ask for government support because a 10-30 billion dollar project is very difficult to finance and insure by a single company. Now the construction phase begins. Making parts for nuclear power plants requires specialized factories which are often already running at capacity because they are busy with other projects. You can now wait a year or more for the parts to be delivered. Alternatively you can also construct factories dedicated to the construction of nuclear power plants. Once you have all the parts and finished the construction process you can run the nuclear plant for 50 years or more. 30 years later a design defect has been discovered. It can be fixed but it requires a partial redesign. 2 billion have to be spent on upgrades. Now 50 years have passed and the plant is reaching the end of its life. The design is now considered obsolete and should be replaced immediately. The government is now on the hook for the decommissioning process. Costs? Unknown but definitively not less than 10 billion dollars. Because decommissioning is so expensive the government keeps the plant online for another 15 years. Your country has several dozens of these plants and once someone makes a critical mistake or a natural disaster strikes you get a Chernobyl or Fukushima type event again. These power plants are responsible for the bad reputation of the nuclear industry but at the same time the industry willingly took the risk. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

Ok, what if we just get rid of those plants and replace them with new ones? The cycle repeats. New design. No economies of scale. New custom factories because the old ones didn't have any customers for 65 whole years. Mistakes can't be fixed. Again, this is not something that green activists forced these companies to do.

You know what the answer to these problems is? Making lots of small nuclear power plants. Companies can afford them. They can be cheaply mass produced. They can be cheaply replaced. Custom factories are maintained over time instead of closed down. Yet strangely no nuclear activist proposes these types of reactors because they do not acknowledge the inherent problems nuclear faces. Instead, the focus lies on new designs that don't even exist but promise to do everything better without addressing any of the actually important flaws. Nuclear plant designs are like cryptographic hashing. You will always find a flaw given enough time.

The right answer is zero time, of course. A renewable smart grid includes long distance transmission lines, short term storage (batteries) and long term storage (pumped hydro). It's never been just about the panels and wind turbines.

There's always the opinion that solar is useless on cloudy days. It's my understanding that on a normal cloudy day they're only 25% as efficient as when sunny, and 10% when it's really cloudy. So, not great, but it's something that is being improved upon all the time.

> In some cases, clouds can actually result in better panel performance than standard sunny weather. A cloud can reflect or sometimes even magnify sunlight, which results in additional power output from your solar panels. [0]

In my country (Oz) we have two states that are into solar: SA has a tesla battery plant (built in <100 days) [1], but more as a 'surge saver', and WA which has recently mentioned it's about to reach serious trouble because solar is now getting in the way of it's existing non-renewable coal (meaning there's an over supply). WA doesn't have battery storage up and running, whereas in SA the tesla plant can ramp up demand almost instantaneously and is saving a bucket load of cash per year (because the coal plants don't need to spin up another turbine to meet demand: something which takes hours to achieve AND is costly)

> "We know that the 100 megawatt capacity of the existing Hornsdale battery has saved South Australian electricity consumers $40 million per year since its inception," he said. [1]

[0] https://news.energysage.com/solar-panels-work-night-cloudy-d...

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-19/sa-big-battery-set-to...

In short, the good thing about solar is:

- easy to set up, low cost, easy to maintain, easy to upgrade, easy to switch off if over supply ever happens. - good for moving away from coal provided you have storage.

As other's have mentioned, the nuclear option costs billions and takes years to set up whereas battery storage of renewables is very very quick indeed to set up, and instantly produces savings.

Note that in Australia the Victorian interconnector to South Australia went down recently at the same time as a coal station outage in Victoria.

South Australia ran on 55% renewables, 65% gas, while powering the Portland aluminium smelter in Victoria for 55 days[1][2].

Also - outside solar - most Australian states gets significant power from renewables (wind and hydro). Right now as I write this roughly 30% of the power in Queensland is solar, 20% in NSW, about 10% is wind in Victoria with another 15% being solar. In South Australia about 20% is gas, with all the rest being wind and solar. Tasmania is 100% renewable (almost all hydro)[3].

[1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/wind-and-batteries-saved-the-day...

[2] https://reneweconomy.com.au/murdoch-media-headline-shock-ren...

[3] https://reneweconomy.com.au/nem-watch/

Actually economically speaking — what reason is there to think that the total supportable size of an economy which operates with grid instability is smaller than one with perfect or nearly perfect grid predictability?

Maximizing value in a world with “power production weather” would be a valuable task from which rewards that aren’t necessarily obvious could be mined if the pursuit becomes incentivized on a larger scale.

> Actually economically speaking — what reason is there to think that the total supportable size of an economy which operates with grid instability is smaller than one with perfect or nearly perfect grid predictability?

The short answer is pretty much all of them. It's pretty much canonical that it is economically more productive to have a resource continually available than not. The right economic question to ask is: Where does the marginal cost of increasing uptime meet the marginal benefit of further increased uptime?

To actually answer this question is hard. The best answer I've seen is between 3% and 10% of total grid capacity, depending on interconnectivity and geographical diversity[1].

That's for a 100% renewable approach, which is great. Personally I think there is a role for gas fired stations - these produce about 50% of the emissions of coal stations, are cheap and quick to build (very roughly $1M for 1MW) and most importantly can ramp up and down power generation quickly and economically.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/grid-energy...

>The best answer I've seen is between 3% and 10% of total grid capacity

It looks like that's talking about 3% to 10% of the total monthly power output.

It is not delusion, but simple economics what makes it impossible to build new nuclear plants. The Obama administration granted permissions to build new plants, but few people were interested because fracking made gas cheaper - but even the ones that were built required loan guarantees from the government. The private sector wasn't able to find a solution by itself.

A nuclear power plant requires billions in up front costs, which take a long period of time to recover, a time which can not be calculated reliably because nobody can predict the future and nobody knows how technology may evolve during that time and how will it affect power prices, how future wars will affect supply, how much demand developing nations will bring to the markets, etc. Even if nuclear power is cheap, the margins are not static and betting billions without knowing when you will get them back is not something everyone wants to do.

Nuclear is going to need a lot of government subsidies if it wants to have a renaissance.

It wouldn’t cost so much or take so long if there hadn’t been decades of misguided propaganda and whining about nuclear.

The fact that nuclear is expensive is not an engineering or construction problem. China is building nuclear fast and cheap, right now.

And there will never be a nuclear disaster in china. Ah the wonders of progress and dictatorships

So, Fukushima disaster could be blamed on Japanese dictatorship?

GP is being part sarcastic, part claiming that China would just keep it under wraps. It worked for the Soviets, for three whole days.

We’re living in a coal energy disaster right now. People fear the wrong things.

If that's true then why isn't every country replacing their old nuclear plants with new designs? Why keep around legacy plants like Fukushima that had obvious design mistakes (emergency generator was flooded)?

Because there is virtually infinite red tape and paper pushing to do it.

There are new, smaller, safer, and easy to build plants that have been waiting approval for years and years.

The US has never had a nuclear disaster but we’ve had countless coal disasters. Oh and we’re living in a climate disaster caused by coal.

Renewables will never be competitive in a market that they dominate because they are intermittent and you can't just turn a city off because it's cloudy and calm. Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere.

This is simply wrong.

Firstly, renewables plus transmission reduce the intermittentcy problem enormously. China has multiple 2000km+ transmission lines already working, and preliminary work has started on a 3800km transmission line from Australia to Singapore[1].

Combine that with comparatively small amounts of short term storage (eg, batteries), as much long term storage (eg pump hydro) as possible and fill the rest with gas generation (around 30% of the CO2 output of coal or oil) and you have a generation mix that is very quick to build, competitive with coal on price and dramatically cheaper than nuclear.

[1] https://www.afr.com/companies/energy/singapore-power-retaile...

No one knows what the Chinese power grid does because it is a national secret. You can have a look at the power grids of the first world, like the European, North America and Australian ones.

Europe is the only one with a true large scale interconnected grid[0] and even there the interconnects are expensive, small and marginal. With the majority of EU population being able to import or export only ~20% of the power generated locally.

The US and Australian grids are even less connected, with the project you're quoting being simply a pipe dream to steal money from idiots. I've worked in data analysis for an energy company and renewables are amazing because they make the energy markets volatile and unpredictable. They allow rent-seeking in power generation. Something that hadn't been possible for decades.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronous_grid_of_Continenta...

The Chinese power grid isn't especially secret. Data is available here[1] or a good write-up on Wikipedia[2].

I live in Australia so I know it pretty well. My state (South Australia) has multiple ~1000km interconnects with more being planned.

Australia remains badly underconnected compared to other markets. Wikipedia has good data[3], and your idea about "looking at the first world" is dramatically outdated.

Most new power generation is being done in Asia (and to some degree Africa) which is where these long distance power transmission lines are mostly being built. If you don't trust the Chinese ones (not sure why - you can go visit a lot of these installations because the hydro dams are tourist attractions, and you can see them on Google Maps) you can just look at the multiple 1000km+ installations in India[4].

[1] https://chinaenergyportal.org/en/category/stats/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects#Asia

It’s not about the distance of the transmission lines - it’s the capacity.

You lose a lot more energy moving electricity through small wires then oil in tanks.

I thought that this was the case but I did some reading and I was very surprised at how little HVDC lines lose - roughly 3% per 1000km (a lot less than AC transmission).

The new Ultra high voltage lines in China and elsewhere are even more efficient.

This explains why the Chinese are able to keep their power generation capacity so far away from their main population centres.

>Nuclear power is the only solution but decades of delusion have made it impossible to build anywhere. In short industrial civilization will be non-viable in the tropics by the 2050s and world wide by the 2100s.

I wonder why they don't find a location on planet which is most stable, away from human settlement.

Then create a nuclear reactor large enough to meet all the world requirement for electricity and supply it to all the world.

Because the cost of transmission will be even higher. Moving large amounts of electricity over large distances is hard; it’s much cheaper to move gas or oil.

Not any more. China's longest power transmission link is 3324 km. 1.1 megavolts DC. 12 gigawatts. Running for over a year. Equivalent to moving 30 million tons of coal per year.

China's cheap power sources (coal and hydro) are in the northwestern part of the country, and the big loads are in the southeastern part. So many HVDC links are going in.

The US's biggest HVDC link is Oregon to California, opened in 1970.

Interesting, though I would like to see more cost comparisons.

Some negatives I've found are UHV lines used for renewable transmission will see low utilization and the switching equipment is quite unreliable so overcapacity is needed.

I did find a book with some details in case anyone wants to dig deeper: Ultra-high Voltage AC/DC Power Transmission (2018) (http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=7AF7982201735A290D8...)

Nuclear is subsidised by billions of dollars, starting from the ongoing research to buying land to construction to security to the massive grid investments needed for any new power plant, to security and contingency measures to finally the eventually externalised costs of (unlikely but possible) incidents and most importantly long-term storage and decommissioning.

Huge huge tax payer subsidies are put into all stages of nuclear, which never show up on the energy company's balance sheets or the 'operating costs'.

I'm not against nuclear but saying renewables are not competitive with this is incredibly naive and blatantly wrong - the subsidies and funds directly or indirectly provided for nuclear are on an entirely different scale than for renewables, which have mainly some research funding, grid extension and development subsidies behind them.

The German CO2 footprint for electricity production decreased quite a bit in recent years, in 2019 46% of all electricity was produced by renewables. The progress is compensated by the traffic sector increasing fuel consumption at the same time.

France has the problem, that they are not able to build enough new reactors (cost, construction time) to replace the aging operating reactors. So ramping up renewables is the logical conclusion and besides having quite a lot of hydro power already installed, France has great potential of wind (very windy coasts at 3 sides of the country) and solar (sunny south).

>- Going away from nuclear and into renewables is in theory good, but the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal.

I am not really opposed to nuclear. But on the renewable side, for the intermittency problem, you have overprovisioning, regional transmission, short range storage with batteries, and long term storage with hydro and hydrogen gas produced from renewables. And both batteries and hydrogen gas are steadily getting cheaper.

That means when a utility is deciding to spend 10 billion or so on a nuclear plant, and it is trying to figure out future rates for the next 30 years to pay that back, it needs to take into account all these future developments, instead of assuming they will stay the same.

I have read a lot of comments from nuclear supporters, but I can't recall one that covers all that. They all seem to assume the situation for storage and interconnection will not improve in the future.

The German government and the EU as a whole is often much more focused on optics than data based solutions.

All governments are like that, it isn't just Germany or the EU.

x1000 this! Lots of EU and German government decisions seem to be made for PR reasons rather than for the benefit of their citizens.

> Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions

Germany has been reducing CO2 emissions. Last year German CO2 emissions were shrinking by 7%.

> Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France. Which means more CO2.

When they increase renewables instead?

There's a lot that can be done with renewables without nuclear or fossils, you can use demand response, batteries, hydro storage, and compressed air storage to store very cheap electricity.

Not everywhere has sites that are good for pumped-hydro storage, typically requiring an existing hydro electric dam.

Compressed air is very inefficient.

But the general argument is: we need to consider what is happening now, not what could be possible under some idealised hypothetical scenario. And right now more renewables, without more, or maintaining existing, nuclear means more base-load coal and more load-following gas.

The problems aren't really technical, they're political. Politics appears to be ill-equipped to deal with these problems.

This is just the typical diversion rhetoric. According to all IPCC reports I've seen, you can't accomplish with renewables without nuclear what you can accomplish with renewables and nuclear, yet all political bodies promote renewables and fossil fuels while pretending it's just renewables.

How is it diversionary to state examples of how renewables can be stored? That is literally the crux of the issue, we need storage for renewables. Nuclear sounds great on paper but look at new capacity additions. No one except China is adding nuclear. So to bring it up over and over here, Many HN commenters simply can't get over the fact that nuclear is way way way more expensive than renewables. Storage is the clear answer, unless you can point me to recently built nuclear and how cheap it is?

How about South Carolina? Oh that was a massive fiasco that cost the ratepayers billions for literally nothing. If they spent those billions on solar, efficiency, and demand response, they'd have far cheaper and cleaner electricity. Instead they wasted billions on a nuclear facility that will never be finished.

> In fact Germany even recently invested in new coal powered plants.

Any sources on this? In Australia in the past few weeks Germany is given as an ideal example of a country decommissioning all of its coal mines and power plants.

We are decommissioning them. The plan was quite badly executed.

Basically, in order to set a deadline, politicians decided to compensate power plant owners for their losses. Problem is: suddenly, all power plant owners came up with very optimistic plans on how long they would’ve kept each plant running.

This would’ve been acceptable to a certain degree if the plan to shut down plants was aggressive to begin with. However, the phase-out plan is largely in line with the plant’s lifespans anyway, so we’re not actually shutting anything off very early.

Reactions have been very mixed, to say the least.

On the bright side, it does close the discussion around coal energy once and for all, but for an unnecessarily high price.

Some shut downs were motivated by the recent increase of the CO2 certificate prices. Three years ago it was at 5€/ton. Now it is at 25€/ton.

search for "Datteln 4"

The UK is a better example.

The dash for gas, it had big environmental benefits but they weren't the original justification.

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

It was also to punish the NUM (Miners Union)

It's being done by the biggest power utility in Germany: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s...

You're not hearing about it because it's very embarrassing to Germans, as it should be in my honest opinion. I get that Germans have a very unique and real perspective on the use of nuclear power. I get that nuclear power has very real and serious risks. It's still done less harm to the planet and the things that live on it than the use of coal. Furthermore, the forced dependence on fossil fuels as a result of shunning nuclear power has all kinds of add on effects. There's no Germany without Russian gas, and Putin knows it.

Maybe I am wrong, but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel because they are unwilling or unable to confront the cultural stance on use of nuclear power. That's the norm for cultures so I don't blame them for it, but I do think it's leading to the wrong choice here.

> but the way I see it Germany is sacrificing the overall less negatively impactful option (nuclear power) for fossil fuel

but we don't. Fossil fuel consumption for electricity production is going down.

I'm sure locals and many others know far more about this than I. I'm very happy with Germany's 2050 renewable plan which is way more than my country would ever think about doing.

It could go down much faster.

One would wish. In reality it's quite difficult. We are rebuilding the whole electricity landscape for a country with 80+ million people. The time frame for this is 50 years.

There are lots of factors which are working against it. For example Germany has heavy coal resources (unlike France for example) and it's the largest domestic source of energy. Thus the country has used it for many many decades and this brought wealth and employment to people. Now to tell them that their coal-related jobs will be replaced is creating massive resistance in certain federal states against changing that.

The only ongoing commissioning of a coal fired plant is Datteln 4. Construction was started 13 years ago to replace several ageing coal fired power plants. Due to technical and legal delays it will go online in 2020. Several other power plants will go offline afterwards, roughly with the same generation capacity as Datteln 4. I think it is safe to assume that this will be the last newly built coal fired power plant in Germany.

Nuclear wouldn't have been a feasible solution in Germany in the long run, because it is just too expensive. You may argue that the shut down of running plants was premature, but nuclear subsidies eclipsed those of renewables by quite a margin. Building new reactors isn't easy, France is struggling with it for example, although I don't think their strategy is bad.

> you can never reach 100% renewables

partly true, partly wrong, depending on your infrastructure and topology, but there are other options to satisfy a CO2 neutral base load than nuclear.

CO2 emission are actually dropping, although far too slow to call it healthy.

The per capita output is somewhere in the middle of industrial first world countries. Sometimes better than countries employing nuclear power, sometimes not. I think the effect is sometimes overestimated. It may be better than coal, but it should be noted that newer coal plants replace older ones that are more inefficient.

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

> you can never reach 100% renewables. So you need a backup, which is either gas or coal.

Why isn't nuclear the backup? "90% renewable, 10% nuclear" sounds politically-viable; it's still "moving away from nuclear."

No, a power source as insanely dangerous as nuclear is fortunately not politically viable at all here in the long term.

Nuclear is safer than any other power source we have.

All other power sources, except maybe hydro, are almost perfectly safe. They're a lot more damaging to people's health and the environment, yes, but that is a different thing from danger.

I wrote "in the long term" for a reason, by the way. I'd prefer to get rid of coal before nuclear despite the danger.

>- Basically the effect of going away from nuclear is increasing CO2 emissions

Phasing out nuclear delays the phase out of coal. It doesn't add any new coal. The problem is stagnation instead of an increase in emissions.

> the open secret is that you can never reach 100% renewables

What, why?

You are ignoring the nuclear waste. We are just burying it in caves which is not really a solution.

> But even Macron wants to reduce nuclear % in power production of France.

What? Why?

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Macron-clarifies...

Because the nuclear power plants are old and new nuclear power plants are more expensive than new renewable.

Because old nuclear power stations are coming to end of life, and new nuclear power stations appear to be ruinously expensive. See Flamanville which was supposed to be finished about 10 years and €10bn ago.

The real idiocy in Germany was retiring the nuclear plants before EOL. If you’re trying to work out whether to replace old nuclear with new it’s much less easy to come to a clear answer. Britain has had the same issue, most people are quite enthusiastic about new nuclear but it’s just really expensive.

It’s the issue with most of these small-n construction projects. Perhaps modular nuclear can be a solution.

Because there are serious problems with the disposal of highly radioactive waste.

As of now there is no proper solution in Europe for the disposal of that stuff. There are a few, work in progress, storage facilities like Asse in Germany which are blocked by local politics.

Lots of the stuff just circles around on the European rail network on its way from temporary storage to temporary storage.

On top these French and especially the Belgian nuclear reactors are in a horrible state. Just have a look at Thiange and you would never want to be near that thing.

And did I say the Belgians have no idea what to do whith the waste too.

> you can never reach 100% renewables

Bullshit. You need storage, obviously.

> Am I missing something

Yes.

Or alternatively/in combination with dynamic demand, smart grids, wide area transmission and overprovisioning.

I don't really get why the nuclear "base load" generation even helps. If nuclear generates 70% of our peak load, and our peak load happens on a windless, dark day - what then? We still need storage and likely CCGT as backup of last resort.

France shows, how much effort it takes to generate a stable grid with electricity being produced mostly by nuclear power plants. Due to the limitations in regulating the power output, they have to operate the power plants not at the most efficient load but a lower one which gives them more regulation capability. Also, using up the electricity at night becomes a challenge. Belgium for example installed huge streetlights on their highways so they can increase the night load.

> dynamic demand

Which does not actually mean turning off the power grid for hours as a lot of people here claim but things like throttling down energy-intensive industry at peak times and running non-time-critical jobs when there's surplus energy.

Nuclear is and never was a solution for Germany:

there is a nice read on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/emc2ne/quelle_surprise_...

Here is one for the base load myth: https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=374

Many reasons for the slow fall are based in politics (coal industry is a job machine especially in the troubled eastern parts) and nimbys (hindering wind development) and politicians helping them out (ridiculous policies governing the distance to "settlements").

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