Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year
bnnbloomberg.ca
bnnbloomberg.ca
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Energymi...
[2] https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Infografiken/Energie/stroma...
Direct link to charts: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...
I think the merit of this idea will become clear among the public when the price of electricity becomes an election issue.
[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/daviz/co2-emission-i...
1. Germany is a net exporter
2. Germany has reduced the production from fossil fuels from about 70% to about 37% within 30 years.
3. At the same time it cut nuclear power from around 28% to about 10.
4. It looks like without reducing nuclear power it could have replaced the equivalent amount of fossil fuels (achieving less than 20% fossil fuels by 2020). However, energy consumption has also gone up since 1990, so it would have required building more reactors.
5. Renewables have replaced about 25% of energy production in the last 10 years.
Not completely, but you can make electricity almost free at certain times of day to encourage shifting usage.
Although there is a natural limit to this, since people have to be home to do laundry!
(Also electric driers are the real culprit, they use an obscene amount of electricity! I am not sure if Germany is big on electric dryers or not though, that is something which is very culture dependent)
Holy crap, doing the math a US style dryer would cost ~1.50 in electricity in Germany to dry one load of clothing.
Sources: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price... https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-el...
So, like, you know, yeah. My dryer has a delay start function on it, if late night prices are 1/2 peak, then I'd save 75 cents a load. Let's say 3 days a week of laundry, $9 a month in savings.
Again, my dryer already does this, it isn't new tech, it is just nudging me to make use of the existing button that is already there!
US electricity prices are so low, eh, not really worth it for the state I live in.
Also, electricity prices are not the same everywhere. My parents for example pay only 20 ct/kwh (I have no idea how they got that contract, especially since they moved only last year. They have low overall usage though (2,000 kWh/a, with fixed cost being like 30% of the total bill)
Atmospheric depressions are bigger than than, and the distance for solar are much bigger as well (other than cloudy, there's day and night).
Specifically, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... puts the cost of wind/solar at roughly 1/3rd the cost of nuclear, so it's more (cost) efficient to spend as much on transmission as you do on generation and build a really well connected massive grid than to use nuclear.
Also there is wind energy which doesn't care about whether the sun shines or not (actually it generates more energy when the sun isn't shining: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/wind-power-turbin...).
Transmitting power also consumes energy - you cannot have a electric wire across pacific to transmit power from US to EU without transformers - electric power line is not a fiber optic that transmit just signal.
I also doubt we have enough rare earth minerals to make all those magnets for wind turbine and and electric car enough for whole planet. Remember also you have to decomission those windturbine after some years which is expensive
Regarding rare earths, we will need them regardless of using nuclear or renewables for electric cars, so that seems partly tangential. For wind turbines their reliance on rare earths seems troublesome. It's geopolitically ironic that we (Western Europeans) get our gas from Russia and our rare earths from China.
You are right that you can't have an electric wire across the Pacific to get power from the US to the EU, but more because the EU doesn't border the Pacific. On a more serious note, Novia Scotia to Ireland is about 2600 miles, so it's on the edge of doable with HVDC, but it would be a massive project and slightly hard to justify.
I'm interested to know what rare earth metals make up so much of a wind turbine. According to https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/66861.pdf (page 65), around 99% of a turbine is accounted for by steel, fiberglass, iron, copper, and aluminum.
https://www.offshorewind.biz/2021/05/24/usd-30-billion-north...
Whats funny about this is, that the wind farm will not even be connected to Iceland itself! I guess they have such great geothermal resources that they don't really need more power.
Looking at maps for power prices with large hydropower dams you can easily see how most countries grids dont transfer more than around 1000km, and often quite a bit shorter. In practice this is the point where it becomes more cost effective to build new powerplants, than bigger infrastructure for transfer.
We could build grids designed for this, but never across oceans, and we are talking about an absolutely gargantuan investment, and its generally not considered as a solution for the unreliability of solar and wind. Its also why no one ever suggests to use the big empty oceans for truly large scale wind or solar etc, its always places very close to land.
Its also worth pointing out that superconductors cannot solve this, even if price and the gargantuan cooling energy requirements are ignored. This is because while superconductors transfer power without loss, they can only do so up to a limited effect, as the power interferes with the superconducting ability after that, essentially breaking it.
That sounds bloody swell. I'd pay for that in a heart beat.
That's an incredibly low amount. Taking Berlin as an example, even 5000km lets you reach plenty of hot, sunny desert areas where any losses will be easily offset by vastly increased solar efficiency. Or you could spread out your wind energy sources to get more consistent coverage.
In fact that's pretty much what Singapore is doing: building a solar farm 5000km away in Australia.
1000km of ocean reduce transmission to about 0.1%^^
Still an unacceptable CO2 emission in my book. Natural gas is at 55,82 [kg CO2 / GJ], when coal is at 94,6 [kg CO2 / GJ]. [1]
So that's only 40% less pollution, and there are still huge quantities of coal that has yet to be replaced in Germany.
What's missing from your view is how you provide for baseload. Right now, what is baseload in Germany? It is coal: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
[1] https://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/CO2-spez/index_e.ph...
What you mean to say is "we need to provide power all the time".
It's not just a syllogism, it's a really weak one. You actually can decide when people "turn on their washing machine". It's called controlled supply, it's existed since the 1950s. Mainly for water heating but in principle any function.
2. Sun and wind only produce a fraction of the time (40% [1] and 25% [2] respectively, and 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of installed capacity this very second [3])
3. Production capacity without sun and wind < peak demand
Germany's mix only work because of neighbouring countries. And their humongous amounts of still existing coal and gas.
[1] https://assets.greentechmedia.com/assets/content/cache/made/...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-...
The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear, that's understandable for a country that can't just print money.
There will eventually be some limit to that strategy (i.e. how do you meet supply at night) and we'll have to see how the next-gen energy storage and nuclear pan out.
People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. After that new fuel rods were introduced into the reactor. A few month later as consequence of the Fukushima disaster it got "shut down"[1], because it was now "not safe". Which is obviously bullshit, cause the rules on reactor safety for German nuclear reactor didn't change due to Fukushima, opinions did and politicians needed to show that they do something.
[1] It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat. Only after the fuel rods were burned down it really got shut down.
That's completely idiotic, correct?
Wow. Idiocracy vibes.
Right this second, Germany is EXPORTING to most of their neighbors. Are they charging the other batteries now or how am I supposed to follow your logic?
Because this debate is more about ideology, than anything else.
Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating, which is a huge part of their total CO2, and pollution output.
You could say that pretty much about any country in the European synchronous grid. Everyone needs everyone else.
> and a great many, rather expensive, gas power plants
The gas plants are actually quite cheap. It's the gas that's expensive.
> Its also worth nothing that the rising power prices have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves and heating
That statement makes no sense to me. Rising power prices are definitely connected to rising gas prices, which don't prevent people from moving away from using gas for stoves and heating but rather motivate them to do just that.
But if they produced nuclear at the price they used to be able to in Germany, before regulations and investment insecurity drove up the price, buying gas just could not compete.
Sweden, notably getting half its power from nuclear, does not need anyone else. Same thing for france.
Except NOT having to heat is even more effective than burning fuel for heating locally. So the move away from gas heating to low-energy buildings is definitely stimulated by higher gas prices.
> Same thing for france.
I doubt that, since France seem to be actually using their interconnects. Can't comment on Sweden, though.
France is self sufficient, but imports when prices are low in order to keep levels high in reservoirs, which further decreases prices over the year.
Gas stoves still come out on top price-wise, but part of that are asinine taxes, where gas is taxed less than electricity.
Those are huge though (at least "natural draft" ones are) and usually made of concrete, and making the concrete currently requires lots of carbon emissions.
Actually, not currently. A combination of regulator-mandated nuclear plant stops, scheduled nuclear plant maintenance and fossil plant closures means that France currently relies on importing a lot currently.
Your statement is true generally, but France's situation currently contributes to high energy prices.
But the real problem is the cost of changing the infrastructure, remember its not just getting power instead of gas, its also switching out every heater from fluid based to power based. Switching stoves from gas to power, etc. Its not only a big investment, but a time consuming and inconvenient one.
Even if power prices dropped to half I would not expect this to be particularly fast, and worse still, historically Germany has subsidized directly(with rebates, taxbreaks, etc) and indirectly(nordstrom2... LNG harbors, etc) the gas prices whenever people complain, or just to prevent complaints.
I guess replacing gas in German households will require both electricity prices dropping to around one third or less, and substantial government support. Or a multi decade power price drop to say one tenth or less.
Temperature in sweden averages about 2 degrees C, and the temperature in germany about 3 degrees C, which can look like a 50% increase, but everything in thermodynamics works in Kelvin, not C. So the difference is between 275 and 276 degrees K, which is about 0.3% or almost nothing.
Its not enough to prove anything, just make it reasonably likely, which is then combined with the qualifier.
Compare building and installing 5 million heatpumps with building 2GW new nuclear power production ? The latter could include at least one city heated entirely by cooling water, but even ignoring that, using Finnish numbers for nuclear, and ballparking optimistically the heaters? They cost about the same, take about the same time to build and install... its unclear to me which would lower individual costs more, which would be better for the economy, or climate. I guess heatpumps win on individual costs, nuclear on the economy, and both being roughly equal on climate. The nuclear plant certainly wins on total maintenance resources/work, but the heatpumps on versatility of maintenance, i.e. you can just say fuck it with heat pump maintenance in a way you cant with nuclear. Nuclear wins on flexibility, while heatpumps win on rollout, giving its highest benefits very quickly, but taking as, if not far longer, to complete. There is often a benefit to mass production over individual small scale stuff though. If we could build at 1970ties + inflation prices though, the nuclear plant power would cost less than a tenth, and output more power than the total heating the corresponding 500k heat pumps provide.
Compare to how people buying and installing large supplemental home solar+lithium ion battery packs looks great, until you consider the cost and time to deploy a million such, and compare that to the cost and speed by which we could produce a large hydropower dam as energy storage. The latter wins by a landslide, or occasionally flood^^. Heatpumps are much better and cheaper, though, so its harder to tell.
- are nuclear power plants cheap? Isn't Hinkley Point C guranteed 10 ct/kwh + inflation. Wasn't it the new Finnish nuclear plant that cost 11 billion Euros? What do gas power plants cost, 20 billion?
> 'which have largely prevented germany from moving away from using gas to for stoves ...'
I would like a source for that. According to [1], 91% of german house holds are using electric kitchen stoves and 7% gas. For heating, they have a larger market share but gas kitchen stoves are not really widespread.
The climate, really.
Olkiluoto unit 3 is a pretty extreme outlier in construction costs. The same amount of power generation capacity from CPR1000 plants (widely used in China today) would cost closer to 2.5 billion Euros, and construction times are about 5 years.
This isn't about averages. It's about meeting demand, which is especially important during the winter heating season.
Doesn't Germany have a lot of wind power? Denmark sure does.
Let's see, 27.2% wind in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
And apparently there's a fair bit of North Sea area that can be used for new offshore wind.
No it’s usage need to be constant, or you'll get black-outs in regions where the grids 50hz frequency cannot be kept - which a lot of communals in Sweden are dangerously close to.
And if you don't keep the network balanced, you'll get complete blackouts instead of regional blackouts.
That's not what I'm saying. On a windy day, then doubling your number of wind turbines will (roughly) double your power output. But if there's no wind, your output drops to zero. Contrast that with nuclear power, where doubling capacity doubles output always.
So with nuclear power you could say that based on what current output we have, if we build X more capacity we could retire all polluting energy sources.
With wind (say) you can't say that.
I'd agree with that. Have you considered adopting a good policy instead?
That's why you install them in the basement. If you can.
Heat pumps require a significant capital investment which would have to be recovered on only their efficiency improvement, since they don't otherwise generate revenue.
The math is different for new construction. There heat pumps make a lot more sense because the capital cost is relative to some other heating system you don't already have. Then the higher efficiency will generally cover the relative capital cost even if it wouldn't cover the total capital cost. This might still be less profitable than mining cryptocurrency (depending on a variety of factors) but better than any other traditional heating system.
No it isn't. I know because I looked into it.
Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increases and rewards drop.
So if you only operate the hardware 50% of the time it'll be obsolete before it's paid for itself.
What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)
Tom's Hardware did a list for GPUs:
https://www.tomshardware.com/best-picks/best-mining-gpus-ben...
"Which cryptocurrency" will also vary over time since the prices are all over the place, but that's the other advantage of not-ASICs. You can switch to whichever one pays better this month.
Sure, but they are so rare at present thay in my entire life I have not even seen one.
Ignore my comment though if you would normally heat by electricity but you use an umlaut so i assume you are a german as well.
Just a few days/weeks ago we had an extreme price hike due to high demand. High demand should only come from consuming energy in a usefull way. Mining your shitcoins for nothing is not helping at all.
You still consume energy which wouldn't need to be consumed as we do have other and much more energy friendlih systems for transaction security.
You are basically an american who drives the biggest pickup truck available and using oekofuel and state its now okay to do this.
Presumably people would switch if the cost of electricity was low enough for it to be more economical. Decisions that result in the price of electricity staying high provide political leverage to gas producers.
Though, eyeballing the numbers, it really should be very attractive to install heat pumps in the EU despite the high electricity cost. The cost of natural gas is quite high.
I think it doesn't really matter much what is meant throughout - point was about shifting gas demand on to the electricity supply, and whether the grid could cope with it if everyone did that to a meaningful degree.
Heat pumps use 1kw of electricity to get >1kw heat.
Similarly a gas boiler uses 1kW electricity (for the pump) to get potentially >1kW heat out of radiators (and pipes). Because that heat is energy conserved from the gas, not the electricity.
Anyway I didn't mention heat pumps or compare them to resistive heating so I'm not sure what I'm defending.
They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.
There are still people in the UK installing heat pumps. Either they have a very rose tinted view of the future direction of electricity prices Vs gas, a rose tinted view of future government taxes/incentives, a rose tinted view of the environmental benefits (eg. By looking at aggregate CO2 emissions instead of marginal CO2 emissions), or they have been misled by installers/builders who make substantially more money if they install a heat pump.
Either that or I got my maths wrong. But I don't think I did.
1. Altruism
2. Already committed
3. They have a pessimistic view of future gas prices.
4. They have solar.
5. They're in a long tail/corner case/different use case from the one you computed.
I'd put my money on 5, depending on how big a % difference. Eg. I've noticed more and more people switching to solar as prices come down and hit an inflection point for them in their use case. Wouldn't be surprised if heat pumps are the same.
* I'm tired of tenants installing window air conditioners.
* I pay for steam heat myself whereas tenants will pay for electricity used by their heat pump.
- ground source was roughly parity with gas (with something like an 8x higher install cost)
- air source heat pumps were more expensive to operate but similar on install costs
However comparing on cost only misses the point, a heat pump is generally capable of cooling as well, which is becoming more of a necessity in the summer.
P.S. You can do silly things with ground loops like use excess solar power to cool during the summer or daytime storing that heat in the ground, then removing some of it in the winter/nighttime.
I’m looking into installing a ground heat pump in a new house (coupled with solar panels) mostly for environmental reasons and all the critics I’ve read so far were about the costs.
It's the CO2 production of that extra generation, known as marginal generation, you should care about, not the nationwide average.
Most of the time, in most of the world, that extra generation is combined cycle gas turbines at ~50% efficiency.
For most people, the only time a new use of electricity is eco-friendly is when all the energy in a country is already supplied by wind/solar/hydro, and therefore a newly switched on thing also gets supplied by wind/solar/hydro.
Obviously the decision to installation a heat pump depends on the marginal generation in 15 years when you are still using that heat pump. That's very hard to predict.
> They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.
Heat pumps are used way farther north in the US since I was a kid, including (now) in places that don't need cooling.
Oh, I give up.
Here's some more choice words on the failures of the current Swedish energy policy:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2021/02/28/irrationa...
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2015.0004...
[2] https://gml.noaa.gov/icdc7/proceedings/abstracts/bhattHI49.p...
Really? 10 to 20x? That's 1,000 to 2,000% Here in the UK we've had suppliers collapse due to some "issues" involving not buying with fixed prices and end users like you and me get bills that are about 150% last year but not 1,000%.
We have (had) quite a lot of innovative suppliers that offered "green" tariffs that were backed by variable suppliers. Unfortunately the shit hit the fan and the price charged back in the day wasn't enough to cover the current rate plus enough profit to cover admin.
https://www.vattenfall.se/elavtal/elpriser/timpris-pa-elbors...
and another:
https://elen.nu/dagens-spotpris/se3-stockholm/
Timpris på elbörsen (on the first site, "vattenfall") means "hourly rate on the electricity exchange". Have a look at the rates for area 3 - Södra Mellansverige (south of the middle of Sweden) and compare with the same day last year ("jämför med - Samma dag föregående år"). You'll see that the rates average some 500 öre (5 sek, about $0.55) per kWh excluding taxes, levies, surcharges and value added tax. At the same day last year the rate averaged about 20 öre, i.e. a difference of 2500%. The rates fluctuate hourly and the last few weeks they've broken all records. The increase for the last month was +245%, averaged over the whole year rates have doubled.
[edit]
Nord Pool have their own reporting on prices:
I'm quite surprised that Scandinavia is having even more problems than say the UK because you have rather a lot of useful topological features (really big hills and mountains and lakes at elevation - ie potential energy). You are also closer to the Ukraine than us for gas so that should be cheaper too.
Our consumer energy market is a bit strange. We have a national grid for eleccy and then have multiple "suppliers" who supposedly compete. The ones who went balls out have gone bust. They generally offered fixed and flexible rates based on the wholesale cost plus their margin. Then the wholesale cost went up rather a lot and they lost their margin and without money in the bank, they went bust. The govt agency for energy then enforced other suppliers to take us on. So I was a customer of "Green" and now I'm a customer of "Shell Energy". You can be sure that Shell are not losing out in any way 8)
I've just noticed that you use the term Nordic countries - is that a better/preferred term to use than Scandinavia?
Scandanavia includes Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The common factor there is having closely related languages and cultures. However, speaking from experience as an American, we often use "Scandanavian" as a synonym of "Nordic".
Nord Pool covers all the Nordic countries plus a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool
Little know fact kept out of the media when we had all the flooding over winter a few years back, one nuclear power station had to be shutdown to avoid a meltdown caused by flooding.
Electricity consumption has gone up with the increase in consumer gadgets, ie computers, tablets, mobiles, big massive flat screens, sound systems ie personal cinema setups, its only natural to see electricity demands go up.
And there is not enough of some of the rare earth materials and other metals used to make or maintain electric cars on the planet unless some miners have been keeping deposits secret, so I expect some miners share prices to go up considerably in the future.
(Which should be done. But it'll take time.)
There are electric boilers...
Radiators are heated by boilers...
No heat pump necessary...
Edit: hyperbole ^
Germany is a great example that these renewable policies can't sustain an industrial lifestyle. Germany is something of a cautionary tale; adopting Germany's policies will make people worse off.
How much energy they produce is much more important when assessing how their renewable transition is going. They have barely managed to tread water by doing less per capita and matching their old supply. This is a far cry from the optimistic touting that solar/wind was a viable market competitor to fossil fuels - the evidence here is that these forms of energy are worse.
Only if you're assuming some kind of linear relationship between energy consumption and happiness, which seems extremely dubious.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2021/06...
Coal exit is not related to nuclear exit in Germany. Germany would have the exact same amount of coal plants if they'd kept nuclear.
Coal is about jobs (and votes) in regions which are already troubled by unemployment. This is why the name of the commission which decided how the phase out will work was: "Commission on Growth, Structural Change and Employment"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
"A good narrative soundly beats even the best data."
[1]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/01/how-narratives-influe...
So these charts that you show only demonstrate that Germany was first to jump on wind and solar production. Great for them, but now wind and solar in neighbouring countries are much less profitable when they'd be less correlated to Germany's huge wind and solar capacity.
Perfect play in a game-theoretic setting, but damaging to the neighbours and the actual goal of CO2 reduction.
Now, let's review some live data: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
The problem with this approach is that you need to overbuild the total installed capacity massively, so that every "somewhere" could, in need, play the role of an energy producing and exporting center for all the other regions.
If 70 % of Europe is calm and dark at one point, the remaining 30 % would need to produce enough energy for the entire continent. (This also means having very high capacity cross-continent links to move that energy around from anywhere to anywhere else. Not easy to build or maintain.)
The most grating thing about the renewable fad is that "herp durp churn out more wind and solar at the margins decentralized" and "massive coordinated grids and/or huge batteries" are utterly different modes of infrastructure production. There is no sense in which getting really good at the former makes one any better at the latter.
Well, except that "ongoing" for nuclear means "100+ years".
https://www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk/science-engineering/202...
* wind: wind power production scales with the cube of the wind speed [1], so actual production only occurs about 25% of the time [2]. Also huge areas produce at the same time: the size of the average depression [3] can often be as large as the continent.
* sun: solar panels don't produce at night. I don't think I need to source that claim. Cloudy weather is not good either.
If you want more data, I suggest heading over to https://app.electricitymap.org/map
[1] http://xn--drmstrre-64ad.dk/wp-content/wind/miller/windpower...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/555654/wind-electricity-...
[3] https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/1000hPa/...
https://scijinks.gov/solar-energy-and-clouds/
And the nice thing about nights is that they are quite predictable. So not a very difficult problem to solve.
Tesla power wall (I'd argue overpriced...): $10k [1]
Cost of an average nuclear plant today: $20bn [2] (+operating costs)
So you could buy and install 2Mio powerwalls for thr price of one nuclear plant. How many powerwalls (or more cost-effective solutions) would you need to balance the demand vs availability of electricity at night?
1. https://solarmetric.com/learn/tesla-powerwall-review-costs-s...
2. https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cos...
> However, clouds can block light from the sun. So, do clouds affect the creation of energy by solar panels? Yes, but it depends on the types of clouds and where those clouds are in the atmosphere.
> When sunlight hits low clouds, a lot of that light – and heat – is reflected back into space. […] So, if you live in a place that commonly has a lot of low clouds, solar panels might not be able to produce as much energy as they would somewhere else.
——
> And the nice thing about nights is that they are quite predictable. So not a very difficult problem to solve.
Non-sequitur. The fact that it's predictable doesn't mean it's not a difficult problem.
New nuclear reactors are expected to run for 60-100 years.
This is one of the neglected parameters of such calculations. CAPEX for nuclear is high, but the resulting structure is long-lived, much more so than solar panels (25-30 years) or wind turbines (20 years).
As for wind, in the UK (it's the country where I know where to find the real-time data easily), wind is only producing about 1/3 of its capacity--about 7GW of 24GW capacity. https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live Overall renewables are generating about 1/4 of total generation.
Point being, most EU countries don't have as much sea to use for wind, so have much lower wind power generation potential.
With wind turbines improving steadily and available in different sizes there is also no big barrier to having them interspersed. Germany or the Netherlands are in large parts densely populated but still manage to put up wind turbines everywhere.
Now imagine that nuclear power production would be greatly increased. How many years of uranium supply would we have left?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium
Fission is effectively as unlimited as renewable energy is, about a billion years’ worth of crust. Even if we stick with typical U235 reactors, sufficient uranium ore exists for hundreds of years, although no one will bother to formally “prove” the reserves for a constraint 100 years in the future.
What’s limited is the atmosphere’s capacity for CO2. Not much else matters in the mid/near-term, except perhaps for ensuring we have enough energy for civilization to function.
One important thing to notice is that place on earth to put wind turbines and solar panels is limited. Now imagine that electricity needs greatly increased ...
At the end of the day, everything is finite
Both of these are not fundamental problems, only financial / political ones. If we decided tomorrow that we really wanted these things we could have them.
Either way this is a category error. Tesla needs those things and used venture capital. A correct thought would be: governments are one way to do this.
Even if fission power is not the long-term solution, it is the desperately needed current solution. Running out of power would definitely kill us slowly. Current rates of CO2 production will kill us quite quickly.
> Uranium-235 is a finite non-renewable resource.[1][3]
> As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply. The identified reserves as of 2017 recoverable at US$260/kg are 7.99 million tons (compared to 7.64 million tons in 2015).[9]
They mention multiple (more or less optimistic) scenarios in respect to finiteness of U235, plus, they talk about the experiences using fast breeders and their current state with respect to market needs.
Breeders would help, but have so far not been very successful. For example, the German Thorium breeder THTR-300 is considered one of the greatest technological failures in postwar history.
AFAIK, THTR-300 is only one of the different breeder models, CEFR from China <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Experimental_Fast_Reacto...> seems to be working, as a new model <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600> is being built since 2020, sure, recycling uranium is not needed at the moment, so you could argue this is not demonstrating the interest of breeding though it seems to be working to a certain extent.
Its silly to consider availability at 0.03% of the end product price.
TL;DR: we have 120years of uranium ore that one can mine at $120/kg. You can mine more ore but more expensively.
[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...
Also worth noting that "biomass" often gets hidden in the "clean energy" part, but that just means burning something other than oil/coal/gas.
And it does increase CO2 and NOx levels when burned, not to mention soot - it's dirtier than quality coal. The growth itself does not capture nearly enough to cover for it.
I think another factor is that private sector (heavy industry) production of energy (with private coal plants etc) probably doesn't count into the production side either.
> biomass" often gets hidden in the "clean energy" part, but that just means burning something other than oil/coal/gas.
That's usually CO2 neutral if it's waste/wood pellets etc. Whether it's "clean" or "sustainable" is a hot topic, but in terms of climate it's a lot better than fossil fuel.
I’m assuming old multi story houses with gas heating typically use a water system (radiators) and only a single basement furnace? In that situation, switching the boiler to anything else or even better just using central heating should be a reasonably sized investment.
It’s not like German cities are unique in how they are built and heated. Lots of other cities have done this conversion in the latest decades.
Gas infrastructure was old and established in all major European cities. Now it’s electrical stoves and central heating in many places.
What's "central heating"? I believe Germany already uses central heating in most places. The question is what powers it. Can it be efficiently replaced by renewable-energy (!) electric heating vs. fossil? Other commenters have posited "no".
The way I see it, investing in nuclear should have been part of the plan, instead of replacing it with renewables (vs. doing so for those uses of fossil where renewables make sense). The fear of nuclear energy in Germany is just ridiculous IMO, and arguably has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. With nuclear power on its way out know how and effort to research and to maintain existing plants and investment in it are at a minimum making continued operation now a liability.
Centrally burned fossil is better for the environment than burning in residential buildings, especially in cities. For the climate it makes no difference though.
Even though it’s a waste of high grade energy, one could imagine powering heating plants with electricity in a pinch. If there is so much surplus electricity that reactors are closed then perhaps…
The Stockholm City gas system, although much smaller than Berlin’s was swapped to a renewable gas (biogas) 10 years ago.
A fossil power plant wastes ~60% of the energy, a nuclear plant ~75%, a small petrol engine ~75%. Once you take this into account, the stats look a little better.
Germany is not doing that well.
* inefficient and too expensive
There's no noticeable affect on Germany's path to net zero, compared with neighbouring countries.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?conte...
Sweden seems the long term success story, despite the more northern location presumbly needing more energy for heating. They have the highest carbon fees in the world, and like Germany seem to have been a bit stop'n'go when it comes to nuclear, changing the date when they intend to phase them out a few times, but generally closing them being the trend.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...
Germany is extremely population dense and nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste. Especially in rich Bavaria were all the AKWs have been build (and where they had suitable rock to bury it).
No one here wants nuclear power. Not even the energy producers. There is no lobby, no support, no future for Atomkraftwerke.
It seems irrational as sealed high profile waste doesn't leak any radiations beyond the natural ambiant radioactive noise. The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.
One could live and sleep every night in a nuclear waste storage building and nothing will happen to them. Similarly, one could swim in nuclear fuel cooling pools everyday and won't have any problem either.
It's way more problematic for health to live next to a coal power plant.
Or you know, after a couple of decades because the storage containers really don't like salt water and start to corrode. And as recovery of the waste was not foreseen initially, it gets really difficult and expensive now.
Edit: gas not oil
even if, it's not because of that we have no coal. it's just not a good idea to use lignite (besides the co2 it also destroys tons of ecosystems which is probably beyond co2) and deep mining is basically dead in germany
What will happen is that more coal will be burned because coal always works and is instantly available; Sun and wind isn’t.
Not saying that the closing is right, but the heading is a little click-baity. Reactors are only about 2-3% of installed capacity, about 6% of production. It's not good, but it's not a catastrophe either.
Good if they actually mean it maybe?
> leading to a likely increase in renewable-power assets in the long term... Yet in the short term, coal is helping to bridge the supply gap.
This just seems asinine. But what do I know...
Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from it? It seems like a solvable engineering scenario from an outside perspective. I just dont get it.
Oil funding of anti-nuclear FUD. Thats it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
And yes, nuclear power can be dangerous as Chernobyl and Fukushima have shown. Those dangers could probably be addressed by new reactors, but those are very expensive. The big problem are the existing old reactors. They are not as safe and require a lot of maintenance. A few years ago, Germany only had 4 nuclear power plants running through the whole winter as 4 others were down for longer maintenance. Then there is the problem where to plut all the nuclear waste, Germany doesn't have a long-term storage facility (though search started in the 80ies).
The Chernobyl plant had severe design deficiencies, and the operators were apparently not properly informed about the dangers of operating the plant the way they did at the moment. The Soviet Union was not exactly the epitome of environmental responsibility. Lots of things went wrong.
The Fukushima disaster was precipitated by a magnitude 9 earthquake and a tsunami that pretty much leveled the entire area and stopped the emergency generators. The backup generators also failed. Pretty much everything that could go wrong went wrong.
People were displaced, and the radiation leakage should be considered significant environmental damage.
The number of people displaced was tens of thousands. Although few deaths have been confirmed, if you're pessimistic, you might be able to come up with a larger figure.
However, the Fukushima disaster was a once-per-several-decades event. Coal causes hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths every year through direct air pollution, not to mention the indirect effects from climate change. That's not a rare accident. That's business as usual.
Yes, nuclear power has risks, and sometimes something goes wrong. Lots of work has been done to minimize the risks, as should be. But it's entirely emotion-driven and intellectually untenable to consider nuclear to be a major risk, comparatively. The damage caused by accidents that apparently should happen at most once per several decades in well-managed (or even less well managed) plants is still a fraction of the damage that coal-fired or other fossil-fueled plants cause every year as part of their normal operation.
If anything, the lesson to be learned from the Fukushima disaster should be: "consider carefully whether to build nuclear plants in an area where major earthquakes and tsunamis are statistically to be expected; design and manage plants responsibly; other than that, it's probably fine".
Nuclear waste is still be a problem but it's hard to imagine it being anywhere near the magnitude of the problems that burning fossil fuels causes.
You're at least going to have to provide some numbers if you want that conspiracy theory to be taken seriously.
It‘s just not a politically viable option. That’s the reality of it, irregardless of anything else.
We're leaving that problem to hundreds of generations to come, who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today. That seems unfair. It's equivalent to Julius Caesar building the aqueducts using some technology that France would still have to pay for today.
I think investing in energy storage - hydrogen, ammonia, pumped storage to mention a few - would be vastly better. Solar and wind already generate more electricity in Germany than nuclear ever did, if it could be stored during the proverbial cloudy days, the problem is solved permanently and in a much better way than with nuclear power plants.
Chances of that happening is minuscule and if left uncheck, global warming will kill more than that.
> who will get no benefit from it, just so we can have cheap energy today
Or they figure out better ways to use it that don’t involve killing people.
> proverbial cloudy days
According to this website[0], Germany had about half a years worth of sunny days in 2020. 50% is a long shot from proverbial and according to tfa it’s being bridged by other EU nations and coal.
[0] https://ru-geld.de/en/country/weather-and-climate/sunshine.h...
These horror fantasies mean nothing.
You know what else can kill millions of people? Pesticides, and anyone can buy them.
Bhopal disaster killed thousands of people and left 500,000 with debilitating injuries when a pesticide factory operated by Union Carbide Limited had a leak due to lack of maintenance. The CEO is wanted man in India, but has fled to the US and theybare refusing to extradite.
https://youtu.be/c1QmB5bW_WQ is aimed at the lay audience.
The issue is that radiation is a silent killer, so it is extremely easy people with vested interests in (say) fossil fuels to exploit our inability to access risk. Coal hurts people every single day, but it doesn't have the same poetic weight as radiation so this is lost on the general public.
Nuclear power is expensive, however. Dealing with the waste is also an issue but firstly, forcing us to deal with the waste seriously is potentially not such a bad thing (assuming we need nuclear in the long run, which unless storage comes a very long way we presumably will), and secondly this is the kind of question where a government with a lot of political capital needs to just find some deserted land to build a long term solution.
It is rational, to be sceptic of such a technology.
Most discussions about it are not, sure. Anti-nuclear is a strong dogma in green circles and not to be discussed about - but there are still real reasons, why it became a dogma in the first place.
Because nuclear energy is not as save and easy as it was promised. It is heavily subsidized, but socialised the risk - and the current storage solutions to the waste are sub-optimal. So expensive and dangerous.
I am open to have them run a bit longer, and rather close the coal plants, but they are not a magic bullet solution.
The fallout sucked, but even that was a minor hiccup compared to the destruction pollution is bringing with it...
I was forbidden from including a smoke detector in a school show-and-tell (UK, circa 1993) because of the radiation symbol, even though there was a detector just like it on the ceiling of the same classroom.
There's a reason nuclear power plant technology is strictly controlled as "dual use": the same technology used for power production can also be used to produce the material for a nuclear bomb. So you can't say they're completely unrelated.
I am always amazed how Germans are irrational about nuclear while nearby countries have a mostly pragmatic attitude. Even in Belgium the nuclear phase out is fake and every politician knows it can not be enforced until Netherlands build two new nuclear powerplants 20 years from now.
Poland is especially bad in this regard. It consistently has one the highest PM10 and PM2.5 levels in Europe (and I assume it should have been much worse in the 80's)
[1] https://notesfrompoland.com/2021/12/15/polish-city-records-w...
I’m not in favor of coal, I know it has health consequences, but the existence of coal pollutants does not negate the existence of health consequences from nuclear disasters. I’m also not against nuclear, but it is clearly dangerous, both to health and environment and for proliferation. Considering and balancing these risks as well as climate risk is good governance.
Just seems like another opportunity to externalize costs onto future humans to me.
Earth core contains gazilions of spent nuclear fuel. Just burying spent nuclear fuel would not make anything worse.
But it is suboptimal, because spent nuclear fuel can be used in the future reactors.
I don't understand why people repeat this statement about spent fuel again and again why there's no problem.
https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...
The EU energy market mandates that wind and solar production must be bought before everything else. What happens at the moment is France's nuclear reduces production when Germany's wind is over-producing; there is no energy storage at all.
So right now, on top of wind uselessly adding to max production capacity, it thrashes zero-CO2 nuclear-allocated capital's effectiveness. That's a form of capital theft.
And on top of that, Germany's huge coal baseline continues producing just as before:
https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
Really, the EU rules should be changed so as to account for driveability in energy production.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3780688-france-shuts-down-nucl...
What's so sad is wind and solar being so concentrated in Germany. If it were more spread out over Europe, it would have lower correlation; and help with production peaks.
There's egotistic, and there's egotistic + harmful.
As you can see even at time when wind provides more than half of Germany's total energy production, the red nuclear bar remains nearly unchanged.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
If you check France's energy production at the same time nuclear energy production isn't affected.
https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energ...
It does affect oil, gas and coal, but hardly affects nuclear.
Not exactly. Operators can bid a price for generation and markets dictate the cheapest generators are bought up first. Renewables tend to have zero marginal cost and are therefore often cheapest. Nuclear also has low marginal cost, but not zero.
Renewables being favored is not a rule but effect of how the market works.
Nowhere nuclear got economic, required massive subsidies - and in the end has been driven by the need for the precious byproducts?
Byproducts, aside from nuclear weapons, which most countries do not have, are a negligible part. Sweden for instance built ample nuclear early, but never built the kind of reactor which is used in nuclear weapon production. Sweden also didnt subsidize it, but rather has been taxing it at an additional 300-500% in addition to long term disposal fees(so little of which actually went to long term disposal they introduced a second free named exactly the same 40 years latter). Despite also discarding the cooling water heat into the ocean completely needlessly, all it took for these plants to be profitable was not forcing them to shut down when public opinion turned. It took a while sure, but plants have been profitable for 30 years now, and could have continued to be so if they hadn't by law been prohibited from upgrading and researching.
Nuclear regulation in most places goes as follows: is nuclear profitable? if yes, increase safety until it stops being so. If technology improves so that the same safety can be achieved using less cost, further improve safety. If this happens while building a new plant, force them to start over. For what that looks like, look to the 3 complete restarts due to previously approved safety measures suddenly being retracted and increased during the construction of the Finnish plant.
Its this idiotic idea that they must guarantee zero percent risk which is the main culprit. Flying kills more people, and more people need power than flight, yet we require far more of nuclear. Many countries built dozens of perfectly safe plants during the 60ties for pennies on the dollar. If we could build those again, you know the ones where less than 0.25% had an serious accident over a 60 year history, and removed the massive taxes, we could have power prices at a fifth of what they are today.
The reality is that we don't have the capacity to fulfill energy demand without controllable sources. You can't just say, "well it's cloudy and not very windy. Guess plumbing just isn't going to work today because we can't power the pumps." Well, you can but you'll immediately get voted out of office and replaced with someone who will build fossil fuel plants to keep the country alive.
Nuclear fission is definitely not environmentally friendly, and will probably be obsolete in 30-40 years. Then the future generations have to deal with the problem that comes with nuclear fission power plants.
What matters is amount of electricity bought from Germany, not amount of generation ran.
Oh, it is. Right now it exports all its coal and gas and wood burning production to neighbors; while only using 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of its installed wind and solar:
https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE
The great question is: how can Germany manage anything with no baseload from nuclear or coal? With current gas prices, it is going to get very expensive.
Merkel herself said that Russia has fulfilled all her contractual obligations. The ones who shut the gas down are the in between countries (hence why Germany was in favor Nord Stream 2)
Ukraine wants to charge high transit fees, Russia wants Germany to turn on Nord Stream 2, which bypasses Ukraine. Russia also wants long-term contracts to lock in natural gas consumption-- phaseout of fossil fuel consumption is an existential threat to fossil fuel exporters.
Holland is building two new reactors, and
'Energy and electricity prices are at record levels due to Europe’s over-reliance on renewables, inadequate supplies of nuclear energy, and shortages of oil and gas due to under-investment in oil and gas exploration and production. Carbon emissions in Germany rose 25% in the first half of 2020 due in large part to a 25% decline in wind, underscoring the unreliable nature of weather-dependent renewables. In response, both France and Britain have promised a major expansion of nuclear energy.'
Very turbulent times in EU energy markets.
I can't speak for the rest of the EU, but energy policy in Belgium has been an absolute shitshow for decades now. No one wants to invest in anything. There's NIMBYism everywhere. No one wants any kind of energy production in sight, which is an impossibility in a country the size of paper towel. No one wants to reduce demand. And no one wants to rely on imports; which is ironic, given that we import uranium, oil, and gas ... ?
Given the costs at Hinkley Point C, Olkiluoto 3, Flamanville 3, it very unlikely that any political party will actually sign off on building one.
Furthermore, starting to build a nuclear power plant doesn't help the 2030 goals one bit. And those are already hard to reach.
Just look where powerlines go from Doel.
It seems that Zeeland has a connection within The Netherlands as well.
I thought that on average The Netherlands is exporting power to Belgium.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/business/rolls-royce-nucl...
'Rolls-Royce, the British jet engine maker, said on Tuesday that it was forming a business to build a series of smaller, cheaper nuclear reactors as Britain looks for ways to cut carbon emissions and to reduce the costs of nuclear energy.
The kind of reactor proposed by Rolls-Royce would cover about two soccer fields, or about one-tenth the acreage of a conventional nuclear power station, the company said.
These plants would generate less power — about one-seventh the output of the giant nuclear installation being built at Hinkley Point in southwest England.
But Rolls-Royce said it hoped to reduce construction costs to around 2 billion pounds ($2.7 billion) each, compared with an estimated £22.5 billion for the Hinkley Point plant. Some of the savings would come from building a large number of plants and making modules in factories that can then be assembled at sites.
The company hopes to build 16 of the plants, known as small modular reactors, and said each could power around one million homes.'
The fear of nuclear energy is deeply rooted in Germany and cannot be simply ignored. The "Anti AKW" (anti nuclear power) movement was huge since the 80s, it predates the fear of global warming, and it was at the core of what became the Green party. And Merkel, who has a doctorate quantum chemistry, came to the conclusion that nuclear power is too risky. And this sentiment had the backing of the parliament. And the parliament had the backing of the population. These are the facts. It is likely that her party, traditionally pro nuclear, will change its opinion now that she's stepped down. But they're not in power for at least the next 4 years, and the new governing coalition has agreed on nuclear being a non-option for energy policy.
Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder . . . served as the chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005, during which his most important political initiative was Agenda 2010. As Chancellor, he led a coalition government of his Social Democratic Party of Germany and the Alliance 90/The Greens. . . . Schröder has been chairman of Russian energy company Rosneft since 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerhard_Schr%C3%B6der
PJSC Rosneft Oil Company (Russian: Росне́фть, tr. Rosnéft', IPA: [ˌrosˈnʲeftʲ] stylized as ROSNEFT) is a Russian integrated energy company headquartered in Moscow. Rosneft specializes in the exploration, extraction, production, refining, transport, and sale of petroleum, natural gas, and petroleum products. The company is controlled by the Russian government through the Rosneftegaz holding company. Its name is a portmanteau of the Russian words Rossiyskaya neft (Russian: Российская нефть, lit. 'Russian oil').
It's not being ignored. We're all here complaining about how short sighted it is. What's their plan for renewables again? Aren't we in the middle of a low sunlight, low wind winter where nat. gas demand is through the roof? So Germany's plan is Nord Stream 2, buying from Russia trying to invade Ukraine?
https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/service/bulletin/regi...
This is a lie.
Before Fukushima she only moved the nuclear exit a few years back.
Just because this is a popular move within Germany doesn't mean we need to support it. Research has shown nuclear to be clean and safe when managed properly, _those_ are the facts. I'm glad the government is listening to its citizens, but I also support using nuclear power and personally think this is bad move with the information I have at hand.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
People don't easily forget when they had to avoid fresh fruit, vegetables and meat for a year because it was radioactive.
Proponents of nuclear energy like to pretend that it is almost completely safe. But if we look beyond the, admittedly relatively low, confirmed number of immediate casualties of nuclear accidents, there are serious long-term consequences that remain an issue for decades and more. And Chernobyl was still far from the worst case scenario as most of the fallout hit sparsely populated areas.
Contrast that with the damage that was done by decades of coal power plants polluting the air you breathe. Coal is more damaging each year than chernobyl was, it just gets much less attention.
In many countries, roughly 30% don’t want vaccines, citing the 1:10,000 side effects, ignoring the roughly 1:1,000 fatality rate (as a fraction of global population, 1:55 of infected[0]).
Same deal with playing lotteries in the expectation of getting rich, or fearing terrorists more than dangerous drivers.
It's an interesting realization when you've grown up in Germany and then live outside of it for a while and realize that not everyone is constantly worried about the world ending tomorrow.
That was a really unfortunate point in the history of our species. Not only because of the lives that were lost or the land that got irradiated, but that event will be indirectly responsible for countless deaths over decades. Not because of anything related to the radiation, but for putting the brakes on deployment of nuclear reactors. We could have safe and plentiful energy by now, with very little downside.
If that sounds ludicrous, consider this: imagine someone saw the wright flyer and said "we'll be using those things to transport millions of passengers at hundreds of miles per hour". That would sound insane as those things were dangerous. Not so much now (although we have paid a price).
Similarly, nuclear tech has advanced significantly. We have designs that cannot meltdown. We have designs that don't cause weapon proliferation. We can reprocess the 'waste'. We can use different types of fuels, some more plentiful than uranium. Instead, we are stuck operating old clunkers. There are still RBMK reactors in operation today (although they have been retrofitted, but still).
Chernobyl was a criminally flawed design one step above what the radioactive boy scout managed to build. That abomination should have never seen the light of the day - and if it did, it should have had a contention building.
If we were really worried about safety and health we should have a planetary-wide ban on coal plants. Not just for global warming, but for all the health issues they cause. Including radiation.
I am a huge fan of renewables (specially solar) and very hopeful on battery storage technologies. But we do have extremely power intensive processes (think aluminum plants) for which we need reliable power that's difficult to satisfy with renewables. Fusion is always 10 years away. Hydro is not available everywhere and can be disrupted as the climate changes.
Wind and solar don't even make sense for Germany given their climate/geography.
Germany should ditch the green and use its amazing engineering to build better nuclear reactors, IMO.
I don't see how wind and solar don't make sense.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2021/09/PE21_429_43312.html
Wind and solar make total sense. All we need to do is overbuild wind/solar generation + invest in energy storage capacity. This can be done relatively quickly, certainly much more quickly than building new nuclear plants.
44% in 2021 according to the graph you linked and 52% in 2020.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/renewables-cover-43-ger...
Well they aren't produced in Germany so if CoVid continues, good luck getting those solar panels.
> have zero costs for waste
Used up windmill blades are buried into the ground and we still have to find a good way to recycle batteries.
> perfectly clear risk profile
Like fucking over the neighbouring countries by using them as batteries or using Russian gas?
This is because nuclear has a very low marginal cost of power - a kJ is very cheap if you’ve already built the plant - so the plants are intended to run full-tilt to make the most of your very expensive asset.
Correct. Nuclear reactors can't be turned on/off quickly. They are suitable to handle the base load, in other words, but can't be used as peakers.
> Wind and solar don't even make sense for Germany given their climate/geography.
Uhm, respectfully, that is a load of nonsense. Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
> Germany should ditch the green and use its amazing engineering to build better nuclear reactors, IMO.
Well, if they start that plan today, it may be done in 30 years. Which is way, way, way too late.
Imo, the more sensible path here is to keep the existing nuclear plants running, decommission the that awful lignite power generation asap, while building out energy storage capacity (grid scale batteries - there are many kinds of approaches, e.g. electrical batteries, reservoir storage and some seriously weird ones involving lots of blocks of concrete). That could be done in the space of a decade.
Any new nuclear plants would not even be out of the design stage in 10 years.
What if we run into unexpected problems with energy storage that push their timeline out even longer than 30 years? Seems better to do both, and accept the risk that we paid for too much clean energy in the end.
The problems to date include very high energy prices. Even larger challenges await; these will grow as renewables they become a larger fraction of total output. Renewable variability isn't a problem when they are a small fraction, but a very large one when they are a large percentage. These are unsolved problems. Land use is also an issue.
If I had to guess this is a constructed incentive to make nuclear less desirable than coal or gas under the guise of safety.
Nuclear, in order to provide electricity at a competitive rate, needs >90% capacity factor. That means it can't ramp up/down and stay in business, not that it can't ramp up/down. Since the fuel is trivially cheap, ramping down does not provide any economic savings. The opposite is true for an CCGT plant.
... and that is the fundamental reason why there isn't any pressure to build new nuclear in the US (I am less familiar with PPAs and grid regulation in the EU).
Coal plants take time to get to temperature and pressure, furthermore the generators themselves have a limited number of stop/start cycles, as cracks radiate outward from the center of the rotor shaft over time. (They are cast in a centrifugal fashion, in a vacuum, to reduce voids to). Periodically the center of the shaft is bored to remove the cracks, but there is a finite amount of material that can be removed.
Gas turbine spool up/down quickly, but cost 2 or more times the cost of other fossil fuel sourced generation.
Hydro is awesome, if you have it, but global climate change is causing precipitation patterns to shift.
And the fish are done for too.
If I had to guess this is a constructed incentive to make nuclear less desirable than coal or gas under the guise of safety.
I can only speak for Sweden. We had for the longest time the most solid energy base with hydro power in the north and nuclear in the south.
Policy has since decades been anti-nuclear though but it really accelerated 2016. Basically nuclear power gets heavy tax and fee penalties while wind gets the reverse treatment.
If you check https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsystemet/kontrollrummet/ you can see the result.
Nuclear and hydro still supply all power - but we now have an erratic additional source of wind power that has such volatility that it can spike its production and reverse in just a day. It's completely uncontrollable and so can't provide a stable base for industry nor homes or offices.
Meanwhile, with nuclear plants now being taken offline, southern Sweden is paying a multiple of higher prices than Northern Sweden.
This is exacerbated by other countries in Europe making similar faulty decisions - notably Germany - meaning that even if Sweden produces energy to export on a good day, prices are high. Northern Sweden is for now safe because there is no bandwidth to transfer the energy produced in an efficient way.
I only hope that the election this year will see policy change to normal again, with a renewed focus on nuclear. Nuclear needs no subsidies, it just needs to not be penalized by inane policies, taxes and bureaucratic nonsense.
During the summer, when less energy is needed, Sweden even had to start its old oil based power plant. The solution is similar in Europe where reliance on natural gas from Russia is becoming normal, in particular for Germany.
In Sweden we have at least come far enough to recognize this as a crisis and the so called environmental party will probably be booted out of the Riksdag come September.
There's still hope, it is to be expected than the gas price surge and geopolitical implications of dependencies will make people realize than it's not conceivable to shut down nuclear power. That's not even taking into account the global warming considerations.
After closing a reactor to please the greens, the French government will hopefully come back in it's right mind by finishing it's EPR and building more (complete nuclear plants replacement is needed right now to anticipate the end of life of the current fleet).
The United Kingdom is expected to have a new EPR to enter service. Finland finally powered theirs two days ago. Nuclear phase out of Belgium seems unrealistic and The Netherlands is evaluating the possibility of building two plants.
France, Poland and Hungary are in favor of including nuclear power in the green taxonomy. It's a big deal because nearly all of Poland's electricity production is from coal.
Since building new plants is expensive and takes time, it should starts right now and be subsidized like new renewables, as Europe will need to replace it's old reactors in just some decades, while committing to CO2 emissions reduction.
Germany seems like a lost cause, though.
There isnt any, there is only strong coal lobby, russian propaganda against nuclear and lots of stupid people that use Charnobyl as an argument.
But it sometimes feels like we should move a bit slower in these matters and be a tiny bit more flexible to not have a huge backlash.
But this is not going to be a game-changer and might be even possible to offset with clean sources.
[1] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2021/09/PE21_429_43312.html
Just as a cynical observation, we'll see how price-sensitive consumer energy demand really is.
price of 1MWh on Dec 21 2021: 316€
https://www.wiwo.de/my/unternehmen/energie/knappheitspreise-...
https://www.services-rte.com/en/view-data-published-by-rte/f...
Spot markets be spotting, we can play this game all day long.
So much for a European partner ...
The cost of electricity production in France is currently lower than Germany, but the resell price is currently close due to those market rules.
Sad, but we should work with what we have.
It's a non-starter proposition.
Especially with WFH (charge EV during day, give to grid at night, end up making $)
https://energy-charts.info/charts/emissions/chart.htm?l=de&c...
It is really unclear to me why everyone is talking about shutting down nuclear power plants, but nobody talks about shutting down lignite power plants.
See also https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac13f1
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Solar and wind have increased, while hydrocarbons are neutral to declining.
Also ironic, the idea that climate activists are a significant cause of climate change.
I live near the Fort St. Vrain Generating Station, a nuclear plant converted to gas in the 90s, and I often think about what could have been if it had been made commercially viable earlier in its life.
Proposing new reactors would be political suicide, unfortunately.
So, here is one of the thoughts that crossed my mind (and I am well aware there are counter arguments to it ). With its high density of energy and perceived higher potential to harm its surrounding environment, nuclear power requires a level of State Capacity and stability that is not found over half of the planet. It is not obvious that it can be a widespread, long term alternative for most of the world economies.
With that in mind, isn't it better if some of the wealthier countries basically front the cost and explore completely alternative (nuclear-free) systems for all the others ? Even if we globally end up with an energy mix ?
Curious to hear opinions with that point of view in mind.
This problem is also known as nuclear proliferation and, as far as I know, is known to people building nuclear reactors. Small nuclear reactors takes them in account: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor#Nuclear_...> ; nuclear smuggling is also monitored: <https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/iaea-database-...>
Unpopular opinion: I do not think it is possible to get rid of the inherent risk of nuclear proliferation, even without building nuclear reactors in non-wealthy countries. Multiple reasons :
* Non-wealthy countries wants to be first-class countries, at some point, they will desire to move on to "energy upgrades", beyond international community (read: wealthy countries), who has the right to refuse them to build such infrastructure?
* Villains will move on to harder targets, but will move on, even if it requires using countries already using nuclear and are actually "non-wealthy" (for some reasonable definition)
It might not be feasible to guarantee the right levels of security for these scenarios, but we can take them in account and work out nuclear reactor models which limits as much as possible the inherent risks.
Consider this bad metaphor: as we are writing more and more software, some of them are increasingly critical to users, therefore, we invest in different levels of guaranteeing software is working as intended (e.g. formal methods, etc.).
I see no absolute reason to not pursue the same avenue here, indeed, I even learned about nuclear reactor startups which are applying modern technology to a safer nuclear ecosystem.
The problem is effectively nuclear proliferation. And in my opinion the two links you provided are embryos of solution.
In the future, it will be legitimate for any medium size city in a developping country to have its own nuclear reactor. At that point the whole procurement process becomes a matter of national security for every neighboring country. Like who is deciding which design is better ? Who gets to pick the winning offer ?
For exemple let's say Germany propose a safer design to a small country with the one time refuel feature, but Turkey propose another design and the buying country has better relationship with Turkey. What standing do you have to make them pick what you deem the better design ? The only recourse is to extend the legal framework and coercition power we use for arm sales. Same regarding nuclear material smuggling.
Except those framework work at the moment because, few country have any use for nuclear material and even fewer want to make a go at it. Once it becomes business as usual to trade nuclear material, it will simply exhaust the monitoring capacity of any international framework. ( At least that's my opinion )
As for the second part of the argument: >> Consider this bad metaphor: as we are writing more and more software, some of them are increasingly critical to users, therefore, we invest in different levels of guaranteeing software is working as intended (e.g. formal methods, etc.).
The question is who the we is ? Energy plant maintenance is closer to server farm maintenance than software building. To twist your metaphor, if many countries were to handle the data infrastructure their economy depend on, they would collapse. That's the crux of the issue, and one of the subliminal teaching the public got from Fukushima. If Japan, the country of the famed six sigma, made a serie of decisions that led to an accident, chances are it's bound to happen to most other (developping ) countries, given long enough time. And I am intentionally not delving into the specifics of those decisions.
With these two sides of the issue in mind, it feels unreasonnable that so many commenters on the web at large are rooting for Germany to fail in the nuclear free direction.
Edit: >> Unpopular opinion: I do not think it is possible to get rid of the inherent risk of nuclear proliferation, even without building nuclear reactors in non-wealthy countries.
I just wanted to add that I commend you for that (blunt) sentence and it really should be part of the standard issues discussed when talking about nuclear.
I definitely agree that's a core question. I believe we are in an instance of public policies and proper evaluation of proposals.
IMHO, deciding if a design is better is not the hardest part, but getting the actual design implemented and not something else is complicated.
In France, there is an organization called ASN — Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire, a strong independent (theorically) organization which is here to ensure nuclear matters are handled with almost absolute safety. As I see, France has been running nuclear more or less fine, of course, there were some hiccups (and there are still some, arguably, nowadays, it is complicated to attribute them to ASN, politics did not help a lot).
Regulation bodies seem to be working, so we are reducing this problem to protecting these regulation bodies and ensuring they are not broken, which is a hard problem, that, we share with many other issues we are tackling (e.g. competition).
Now, I see an even worse concern to "who gets to pick the winning offer ?" related to the previous question. Decision makers can have a bad habit to select solutions which are made by market leaders, e.g. tech guys buys some IBM because no one gets fired for buying some IBM. Therefore, selecting winning offers has to be done with more than paperwork and financial health: orgs like ASN has to take an example, a demo reactor, check it, try it, verify it, etc, etc.
Though, I am deep in speculation at the moment, there will be many more specific challenges which I cannot know about.
> For exemple let's say Germany propose a safer design to a small country with the one time refuel feature, but Turkey propose another design and the buying country has better relationship with Turkey. What standing do you have to make them pick what you deem the better design ? The only recourse is to extend the legal framework and coercition power we use for arm sales. Same regarding nuclear material smuggling.
That's a correct concern, one which would exist, as per my unpopular opinion, no matter what, we give up on nuclear or not as an energy source.
> Except those framework work at the moment because, few country have any use for nuclear material and even fewer want to make a go at it. Once it becomes business as usual to trade nuclear material, it will simply exhaust the monitoring capacity of any international framework. ( At least that's my opinion )
I am not sure to what extent the dynamics of international framework can be scaled up, but that is also a right concern to have.
I would say that starting with very strict measures and trying to uphold them might be a start, the objective is to make it obvious that trading nuclear material must be done with the utmost care and no money can be saved up in that concern. It might help to keep the monitoring capacity to be enough.
In the case where we have no monitoring capacity left, I would argue this is the responsibility of everyone (read: citizens and politics) to reinforce these, as we are all gaining from that, otherwise, there is an unknown risk to run into unforeseen consequences.
Thankfully, this kind of responsibility is also here when elections can put dangerous people in office. :-) We should be able to exercise it better and more, though, it is no silver bullet.
> The question is who the we is ? Energy plant maintenance is closer to server farm maintenance than software building. To twist your metaphor, if many countries were to handle the data infrastructure their economy depend on, they would collapse. That's the crux of the issue, and one of the subliminal teaching the public got from Fukushima. If Japan, the country of the famed six sigma, made a serie of decisions that led to an accident, chances are it's bound to happen to most other (developping ) countries, given long enough time. And I am intentionally not delving into the specifics of those decisions.
I would argue that the case of Fukushima is particularly special, so specifics would be needed, but I will try nevertheless without delving into it.
Nuclear plants require more than just maintenance, they also require dismantlement, construction, etc. The fact you require humans to perform these operations, collect samples, etc. is quite outdated, and we can build software and technology (read: use dumb robots that go through a plant and monitor some metrics, come back to a lab and upload their files).
What is annoying is that each step is hard and bothersome, so we try to extend the lifetime of our plants, making maintenance harder, etc.
Server farm maintenance is easier at some FANG companies (and more) because they can rely on technology / robotics to alleviate bothersome tasks. This can rely on stupid machines, but, sometimes, on some non-trivial software.
Therefore, I claim that server farm maintenance up to a scale require some software building.
Now, sure, countries do not have the ability to handle the data infrastructure of their economy. Nevertheless, this is a challenge that many countries (including France) will have to partially tackle, the reason for that being: data sovereignty, at least, for citizen data (health, etc.). France already failed multiple times, is that reason to stop trying?
With this in mind, we can devise a strategy where we strengthen our technology infrastructure aiming for a sophistication level of FANG companies, with the funding of public bodies, while thinking about how to make safer, sounder nuclear plants and letting experts in international matters handle the negotiations with the neighbors.
Where we := society, precisely, everyone plays a part: (public|private) research, software companies, government, "interested" citizens (through Open Data for example).
> With these two sides of the issue in mind, it feels unreasonnable that so many commenters on the web at large are rooting for Germany to fail in the nuclear free direction.
Of course ; I believe this is true in general BTW: no one should wish for a country to fail because they made apparently "bad" decisions, truth is: things are always more complicated and harder.
Though, I can get the feeling of these commenters, looking at Europe energy landscape, reading reports from electricity public bodies, it is frustrating.
But I would rather use this energy (no pun intended) to see how we can move forward taking in account these decisions, rather than wasting time on wishing fellow humans to suffer from electricity issues.
> I just wanted to add that I commend you for that (blunt) sentence and it really should be part of the standard issues discussed when talking about nuclear.
:)
In richer countries solar power works well but requires elastic grid and storage investment. In Poland many people get it and new homes get heat pumps as well plus good insulation to reduce demand. But in rich countires all that matters in production needs in the end. I think China will lead in this as they are most pressured.
I was on Kos/Greece recently and was surprised that they have 0 PV panels but everyone has solar water heating. Maybe they have some other good elecricity source and that makes it uncompetitive.
Most poor countries can rely on solar as it's aboundant there. They will also want nuclear though to desalt water -> see in 20 years.
Also by implication there is a lost of bad energy uses we must prohibit. What else is on the list?
Plus crypto dynamically changes the mining difficulty.
I wouldn't phrase it like that.
I wouldn't split customers in reasonable and unreasonable ones.
I'd just estimate how much energy each person uses on average, both for heating or running devices and in the products they purchase.
Then I'd bring up energy price to a level where it's barely profitable to mine crypyo. I'd do that by taxing energy manufacturers.
Then I'd calculate how this increase will increase cost of living to average person. And pay out every person basic income at level high enough to compensate for this price hike.
Taxes might be used to steer energy sector rowards greener energy sources.
Companies can adapt to any energy price. Subsidizing exports might be needed to keep your exports globally competitive. Taxing imports according to energy consumed in their production might be needed to provide fair competition between imports and locally manufactered goods locally
And what is plan B - more gas from Putin? Insane
But we shouldn’t worry as long as we can import expensive dirty energy from other countries and complain it’s them and not us not doing enough to stop global warning.
Thanks for the website. It'll definitely come in handy.
Edit: With Germany shutting down their nukes, I'm curious if them being a net exporter remains true.
Yes, they didn't do much last year. This is because the last Government didn't care or rather even sabotaged the Energiewende but last year wasn't representative for the whole programme. Also, the new Government will push where the last one slept. Everybody who's even remotely interested in Germany knows that. Didn't you?
In normal circumstances France should be exporting to Germany right now (it would make no economical sense for German grid operators to use the very expensive gas if neighbors could deliver lower cost indigenous production). Sadly right now France can't deliver and it increases tension even more on gas demand.
Thanks to it's nuclear power, France is the first electricity exporter in the world, Germany is a close second.
That's very questionable. Unless they have audited and found uncorrectable design flaws, it really doesn't make sense. A lot of the push seems to have come after Fukushima - an entirely different design, in a different country, with different regulation constraints(some of which were actually violated) and in a region subject to severe natural disasters.
It's not like the risk to German plants suddenly increased after that event.
Majority of German media outlets are in support for transition. German private households already pay one of the most expensive electricity in the world. With prices going even more up, I'm not so sure many would be happy to pay even more.