wondering if it got worse - if they did manage to build more nuclear plants like French did (75% from nuclear) instead of closing them all down, maybe Germany will be able to heat their homes without CO2 emissions in winter.
https://phys.org/news/2018-11-france-nuclear-reactors-macron...
Except for China and India that is. China has 12 under construction, India has seven under construction.
I have no idea what you're talking about. The 12 reactors under construction in China are equal to 19% of France's entire nuclear base. And those are just what China has under construction over the next four to five years.
In the 20 years it will take France to expand Flamanville, China will have deployed new nuclear capacity greater than the total installed nuclear base in France.
They're not 12 nuclear power plants, they're reactors.
China is adding 35-40x the new nuclear power generation vs France over 20 years. It doesn't make much sense to only sample 4-5 years for such a ratio given how long it takes to build nuclear. If we only sample out to 2024-2025, France may be at zero on that scale given the endless delays in their construction. Not to mention, if we pick up the sampling after France is done their present construction, China's advantage jumps to infinite, since France won't be building anything.
You're also moving goalposts repeatedly in these comments.
First you said nobody can build nuclear today. I point out that, in fact, China and India are building nuclear just fine.
Then you say that what China is building doesn't compare to what France is doing. Then I point out that, in fact, China's 12 new reactors are considerable in output, so much so that they're equal to 1/5 of France's entire nuclear base. The output of those 12 reactors is far larger than anything France is building currently, many times over.
Then you move the goalpost again, to a matter of ratios, which I didn't dispute in the first place because it had nothing to do with what you originally claimed.
Your ratio premise requires that China stop building new nuclear power, when their plans are the opposite, they're going to keep building, whereas France is not. For China it's an ongoing process of adding.
The thing is: France is not building enough nuclear power plants to sustain their current nuclear production levels. Finland is struggling to finish the one under construction (vast cost overruns), the UK has a single plant in production with guaranteed prices way higher than market (they want to keep nuclear capability for military reasons I guess). In the US, two half finished plants got abandoned for cost reasons.
Yes, China (and some others) still have ongoing nuclear power plant construction, but compared to the country size, their efforts are also miniscule. To get to the same level of nuclear production, China would need about 1000 plants. They are very far from that and their expansion in renewables is much larger than in nuclear.
Renewables were still expensive then.
Oil prices were heading over $100/barrel - with no reason to believe they would drop.
There was a lot of hope around the new generation of automatically safe reactors.
Hinkley was supposed to be the first in a chain of new reactors, with later reactors having decreasing costs due to economies of scale and learning.
Time passed, delays accumulated, the situation changed, and I guess they just refused to adapt to the new circumstances, because they'd already spend so much money?
They don't need to build anymore, they just import it.
I lived 30km away from Alsace, and despite us having a significant amount of solar on all of our buildings, as did most of the local community/neighborhood, it was well understood that a significant amount of Baden-Wuttenberg's energy (the 'greenest-centric' Stat of Germany) needs were just bought from France.
I don't have the figures in front of me, but I was there in 2012-13 during the transition, and I lived in an old 7 bedroom old Chateau style home that had its top floor being renovated, which was exposed to the cold winter.
We lived on the bottom floor and mainly relied on wood heat from the backofen in the center of the home to heat the rest, and when we didn't/forget to keep it goin I could literately see my breath while I laid in bed as I lived the furthest away from the source, and as someone born and raised in SoCal it was incredibly terrifying at first.
Before I wised up and figured out the heating method I often made my bed before having a shower and going to bed and I stuck a 2L glassflasch with hot water from those instant water heater kettle's. But it wasn't long before I summoned the inner pyro in me I had suppressed since my early teens.
That is highly unusual for Germany - and most probably you'd be eligible for major reductions in rent paid until the landlord fixes this (depends on the actual temperatures attainable with the heat source).
Anyway, nuclear wouldn't help here: Only a tiny fraction of housing in Germany heats with electricity. It's mostly gas, central heating from power plants (with hot water pipes laid into the neighborhoods), or geothermal.
I laughed. In temperate New Zealand we have some truly crap housing and this is seen in many houses during our mild winters.
Germany is a net electricity exporter, we don't "depend" on French nuclear energy. But of course, Germany is part of an Eurpean grid, so depending on the load distribution and the weather, there is a lot of inporting on exporting, because eletricity is traded across long distances. While often there is a significant amount of elektricity going to Germany, that is usually just transiting to other countries. And at other times Germany is exporting to France (which then often is transiting to the UK).
I was there for my Biodynamic farming apprenticeship, and that was just what it was. It was fine, and I spent quite a bit of time there I enjoyed my time there and it taught me a lot how to cope with issues with older homes and it helped me learn to do repairs where needed.
> Germany is part of an Eurpean grid, so depending on the load distribution and the weather, there is a lot of inporting on exporting, because eletricity is traded across long distances.
I figured, but I was there not long after the phasing out period and solar was still being deployed, so much so I actually got to work on a few builds.
> Please stop spreading myths. Germany was an energy exporter for most of the last years and even to France in the last 5 years
Look at the years I listed, I was there 8 years ago not long after Fukushima. Was that still the case back then?
And while the oldest plants were switched off after Fukushima, Germany didn't just "switch off" the nuclear production. The nuclear contribution to the electricity production gradually declined from 19% of all electricity in 2011 to 12% in 2020 so far. The next years should bring a steeper decline though, as more plants get phased out.
Of course there are some antagonistic nations like Russia that would gladly take advantage of a one sided deal but most countries in the EU are not like that.
Please stop spreading myths. Germany was an energy exporter for most of the last years and even to France in the last 5 years [1]. And it's not that we just export in summer and import in winter [2].
[2] https://www.energy-charts.de/exchange.htm?source=de_ce&year=... [2]: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
Whee! Fractals for free!