Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

This is not a good basis for a discussion.

Storing a weeks worth of consumption on a 'per person' basis can be done for a fraction of $1m. But energy scarcity will lead to an increase in prices, which in turn will lead to a reduction in consumption. One big problem with energy is that it is still way too cheap.

Another problem is that there are a lot of subsidies involved for large consumers as well as extra taxation on small consumers.

I'm pretty sure at the kinds of scale you'd need for a country price per KWH would be significantly less.

Are there other politicians that are invested into natural gas?

Could you explain the logic behind that idea that France subsidizes to fossil fuel is proof that nuclear is expensive? To me it is proof that the fossil fuel industry will extract its cut as long as the grid is dependent on it.

Also, a technical details. In actually billions, France is not subsidizing fossil fuels more than Germany. France total subsidize is about half of Germany, so the actually money that goes to fossil fuels are quite much smaller as a result.

In that case, we should make the price of power relative to your wealth, shouldn't we? I'm guessing you're an academic and work in tech or consulting, so you make two, three times the national average if you live in Germany. Trippling the price of power will barely register on your level, so you have little incentive to conserve energy. However, if we said that e.g. a kwh costs 1/15000 of your personal wealth, you'd have a lot of incentive, because even if you start the year as a billionaire, you'd be broke if you used 15000kwh.

I have a feeling that none of the -typically well-off- proponents of "we must make the people pay more so that they stop consuming" will be a fan of that.

So it's not at all clear that the UK would have been in a worse position if it had been able to take advantage of the EU's lower vaccine price, and in any case, being an EU member wouldn't have prevented the UK from securing its own vaccine supply, as Hungary did.

[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

Many people are saying this.

> An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.

What matters is whether increased reliance on renewables slows down the decarbonisation effort. If you have data which shows that, I'd be interested to see it.

In return, let me offer a study from last year which found: "in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy. And in countries with a low GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production clearly associates with CO2 emissions that tend to be higher."

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/53376

I just added a source that shows that data tells something completely different. In the past ten years, German renewable generation more than doubled (from annual ~100 TWh to ~250 TWh) while their natural gas consumption for electricity generation today is basically the same as back then (somewhere around 90 TWh annually from gas back then as well as today). Not sure how natural gas stagnation can be described as "large increased reliance".

Check for yourself: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...

Can you find 20 people who have died installing solar panels? I found about 7 examples on google globally (3 in the US).

The rest of the pages were the dubious statistics calculating "deaths per TWh" that both downplay cancer deaths from nuclear power and extrapolate tens of thousands of falling-off-rooftop-deaths if we generated as much electricity from our residential rooftops as we would from nuclear (which we wouldnt, rooftop solar will always be comparatively minor).

This says very little about solar it just says that clambering about on roofs kills people.

Academic handwaving after the event has very little bearing on the amount of Human suffering that took place, the displacement and the impoverishment and degrading experiences (Fukushima victims lived in a FEMA camp like situation and were deemed untouchable in Japanese Society like the Hibakusha before them and incurred massive property losses in addition to the Human costs) furthermore it's hard to explain the severity to people who have never experienced a Nuclear incident themselves. The level of scaring you're left with, the PTSD that comes with it is something very few living Humans can relate or truly empathize with and I speak from experience.

You're never the same, you come close with the reality that this technology was not fully thought-out in the 20th century when it was created and built with near headlong fervor with no thought to the repercussions of it going wrong--and in most cases it's at a time your in a life-death situation.

Most plants are built in the coastal area and often only have one way in and one way out because of the cost and practical aspects of building freeways along the coast. You are essentially trapped in when everyone tries to evacuate on their own and you're left with the realization that the energy that was generated was mainly exported at a profit for a private company who will later find ways to absolve themselves of criminal negligence and declare bankruptcy before restitution is ever made to the areas where it was built--look at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Edison, and going back to Bectel in the 70s with SONGS.

And regulators like the NRC will simply acquiesce and allow for the waste material to lay in an actively seismic area that if unsettled could be just as catastrophic to the Ocean and local area as if the plant were still operational. They assumed NV would continue to take it, and were left with no other solution when they refused.

To be clear: I'm more optimistic about 21st Century approaches to Nuclear than I was to 20th, which I would say was a DOA thing for me after having lived through SONGS, due to the effects of climate change (the ongoing Boulder fire being the most recent proving how absurd this has gotten) but that doesn't detract from the fact that Nuclear needs to be far more monitored and regulated in terms of waste management and city planning before a single brick is laid down.

With that said, I'm glad Diablo Canyon was shut down, if fusion is just around the corner than hopefully that will be what takes SONGS and DC place when its ready, but until then solar, wind and other forms of renewable are more suitable alternatives to fossil fuel plants.

Furthermore, it's biggest proponents should be forced to live to next one for the lifetime of the plant. I can't see how that be enforced but the way some of you speak with such hubris like it's the most easiest and practical thing to do speaks volumes of just how ignorant and detached you really are from reality of the drawbacks of nuclear plants and the immense complexity that comes with them.

Germany's alleged dependence on Russian gas is mostly a fairytale of US propaganda.

Build renewables and nuclear instead of increasing dependency on gas from a geopolitical bully?

It’s not a great line, what is needed is how much generation and how much storage is needed.