Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zababa | Hacker News Reader

Maybe throwing out nuclear power to burn coal wasn't such a good idea after all? Why can't she recognize that it was a mistake?

View on HN

Where is the big increase in coal? If you look at the stats coal use is down.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

What is not well known in the Anglosphere is that the German nuclear phase-out was actually legislated around 2000, and not in 2011 after Fukushima.

In 2011 Merkel extended the phase-out end date by ~10 years, which was democratically very unpopular. 3-months later Fukushima happened, and the phase-out went back to an end-date similar to the original.

More charts here: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

It's not a direct increase, but you can see in your chart that the lignite and hard coal stayed stable (and lignite actually increased) before 2015 for hard coal and 2019 for lignite. Meanwhile nuclear has decreased. I'm glad Germany is getting better at renewable after all these years, but all that coal burning had and still has a human cost.

> What is not well known in the Anglosphere is that the German nuclear phase-out was actually legislated around 2000, and not in 2011 after Fukushima.

I'm not in the Angloshpere, I live in France. I'm probably biased for nuclear power, considering our country depends on it a lot. On the other hand, like with the Chernobyl radioactive cloud, our frontiers sadly don't block pollution rejected by the Germans coal plants.

I hope France finds a path forward. Last I read it's sitting on an aging fleet of reactors, and failing to build new ones in a timely manner.

The big German power companies definitely have a lot to answer for. At least there is now an agreed timeline to shut off all the coal plants.

It absolutely was a mistake, but it's been made, and it's time to finish driving forward with renewables, pumped storage, batteries, transmission, and cross country interconnectors. Germany's renewables capacity is enormous [1] [2] (56GW of solar, 63GW of wind, not counting rooftop solar generation), and there isn't much more coal to replace (44GW of total capacity, with a median generation of 15GW). For comparison, nuclear generation capacity is ~8GW, but should be held onto for as long as safely possible.

[1] https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/DE?wind=false&solar=fals...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/pclDG80.png

That is such a bafflingly bad decision. Will politics literally sink the earth eventually ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com