German multinationals (in the energy sector such as Siemens, Wintershall) have removed it from their strategies because Nuclear technologies inefficient and bear a lot of risks. New reactor types don't work as promised.
Government does not want Nuclear Energy because it needs enormous amounts of subsidies, and still there are regular cost overruns just as enormous. And Consortias still demand price guarantees. Worldwide the number of operational reactors is decreasing anyway. Nuclear reactors need a lot of protection (physical security) . Instead a decentralised infrastructure is envisioned.
The German general public does not want nuclear waste, and not even nuclear transports across the country. It's a form of NIMBYism, but the point is valid.
The German anti-nuclear movement is very old, covers 2-3 generations.
Germany is densely populated and the prospect of entire countries becoming inhabitable after a single disaster of a nuclear power plant is feared and despised by many people.
I can understand in some ways that they do not want to spend more than €50 billions a year on subsidies. It is already a lot of tax money. The question however is what they are getting for those €50 billions they are already spending, and if the result is a desirable one. Being dependent on Russian gas and oil is a pretty high price to pay, especially when it help fund invasion forces into EU.
(Source: https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/default/files/annex_to_the...)
The thing that's a little crass to say right now, is that: Russia imploding to focus internally, Putin gone, Ukraine integrating further into the EU, is like a full bingo card of items that was strictly in the 'keep dreaming' section 3 months ago.
Now it is the best outcome for the EU. Still unlikely, but not categorically impossible.
Nuclear power has been economically inefficient for a long time.
This is true for many, many economies. Even in places like Japan and South Korea, nuclear energy is more expensive than seaborn LNG.
The reason that nuclear energy has been supported is the "unspoken" externality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_latency
Having a "peaceful" nuclear plant, means you can throw together a bomb pretty quickly if needed.
Hence countries like Japan/Korea, with active space and rocketry programs as well as a thriving domestic nuclear power industry, have been considered "quasi-nuclear powers" by many. Their "time to slap together an atom bomb," given a large national supply of nuclear physicists is not that long.
Germany, is very supporting of pacifism.
Hence, since the German approach to foreign policy is fundamentally "we don't want nuclear weapons because we really don't want to engage in warfare, because warfare is immoral." They don't want nuclear power.
Yeah, and didn't you realise most countries in the world despise America?
Keep in mind the non-American perspective.
I'd say that pacifism only works as long as nobody cares to attack you, or you have someone else around, much stronger than yourself, to protect you.
That is, it works as long as you don't have to face any real evil. I'm afraid it's not a realistic long-term policy.
Germany practices it.
> That is, it works as long as you don't have to face any real evil.
Also, lets not conflate national interests with good and evil. That's the propaganda talking.
Do you mean NuScale or Hitachi BWRX-300?
Is the perception that Germany will be better off with the problems that dropping nuclear creates, or are those not acknowledged?
Now the political agenda is (and has been for more than 20 years) to promote renewables. For baseline demand (that renewables cannot reliably provide) Germany is betting on Biogas and better storage mechanisms.
The current administration is left-leaning. The Green Party was founded in the 1980s by environmentalists which made it their mission to get rid of nuclear.
I'd say that the public knows that these types of energy supply have problemens too. And the debate is ongoing.
Really? I thought China (and maybe India) was building many more.
From my personal perspective, I can definitely relate being nuclear skeptic due to Chernobyl (I was 7 years old at the time) and basically constant demonstrations/problems with the end storage facility subject - for as long as I remember.
Also, at least in my memory around ~2000 it became clear that nuclear was not economically viable vs going green and that was also when the Atomausstieg was sealed by the new Schröder government which had the Greens in the coalition.
Merkel (conservative) wanted to prolong the run times but when Fukushima happened all those plans quickly turned over.
Happy to answer any questions about it.
Here's a neat map where you can view the current electricity generation mix for countries in real-time:
And yet, Germany has twice the emissions of France because it relies heavily on gas and coal. Very sad to see that global warming is considered more economically viable than nuclear energy.
That would be surprising. I would have said that renewables (without comparing massively subsidised and unproven renewables costs with unsubsidised and well understood practical nuclear costs) would only be relatively recently even in the same ballpark as nuclear. And even then, only when the sun's shining/wind's blowing.
Random quote I found: "In 2020 renewable energy sources produced more electricity than all fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) together and now provide 45.3 percent of German electricity demand."
Electricity demand is just a part of energy demand though, so getting all heating to e.g. heat pumps will be a major effort.
And after that, Schröder got his deserved chair on Nordstream AG and later Rosneft and Gazprom.
When my country joined the EU they were forced to decommission an old nuclear power plant. Before that we were a net exporter of electricity. There was talk about building a new plant to ensure energy security in the region and reduce dependence on Russia, but it never materialised.
If Germany - which most of the smaller countries look up to - did not make this decision our energy landscape would look very different today. Over the last winter we have seen energy prices go up 50% or more (electricity comes from Russian gas, and heating comes from Russian gas) and inflation in general is up over 10%. Maybe in rich Germany this is not such a big deal, but here where people do not earn so much it is.
This is such a strange statement as nuclear is the greenest power source.
However, the highly destructive, scary and dangerous trash that it does produce is like a comical epitome of the kind of visible pollution the first generation green movement was fighting. There is a reason that dystopian sci-fi trash heap illustrations always feature a leaking nuclear barrel.
Combined with the fact that Germany is just (fairly) densely populated everywhere, criticism of storage solutions are not about endangered desert lizard species, but about radiation spikes in elementary schools.
I'm both German and would like to re-establish nuclear here as a necessary evil, but I get the contra points. I hope this gives some perspective :)
And that's without considering fuel reprocessing, which would not only drastically reduce the raw fuel need (and therefore increase the green value of nuclear power), but would reduce the final waste product to something that could fit in a broom closet.
The scale of the nuclear waste problem is seriously, seriously oversold.
Hanford alone has enough liquid nuclear waste to fill 80. Does that waste not count?
Note that storage solution for radioactive waste is necessary even without nuclear reactors, as there are plenty of radiocative waste from radiology/radiotherapy devices and also associated accidents, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident .
Each euro earmarked for a nuke plant is a euro not spent building out solar, wind, and storage that would yield much more power than the nuke, almost immediately, and have extremely low operating cost. So, not green, because it competes with actually green for capital.
I'm sorry that I'm not that familiar with the German regulatory situation, but here in the USA for example new nuclear plants are required to pre-fund their decommissioning costs upfront before they are ever turned on, and have insurance against accidents, etc. Which is probably a good thing and I'm not arguing against--except that literally no other source of energy is subject to the same requirements. And so when people say "nuclear is expensive!" they are comparing apples-to-oranges.
A coal or natural gas plant generates literal tonnes of environmental waste that they don't need to pay to clean up, and they aren't required to have insurance or bonds against the much more likely industrial accidents their workers and community members will suffer.
Same for solar, which would be a heck of a lot more expensive if solar installation companies had to insure millions of dollars against their workers falling off roofs, or pre-pay the costs of smelting solar panels that reach end of life so their parts don't end up in land fills.
Nuclear isn't expensive. The nuclear energy and regulatory environment is. As it was designed to be by people who don't want nuclear power.
Even if this was true (which I don't think it is) then what are you proposing? Relaxing the regulations?
It is expensive because any large unit of capital in a public works context is expensive. (A clear majority of this cost is in unavoidable structural corruption tax.) On top of that, operating a nuke is very expensive: this is where fuel cycle costs come in, including mining, refining, processing, and disposing, as well as others like fixing turbines and guarding access. On top of that, shutting one down is expensive. None of these costs are falling, while alternative cost are, so, relatively, they are all sharply increasing.
(Coal, oil, and gas are also expensive, mainly in environmental effects, and their costs are also increasing, relative to renewables. They do not count here, except in how they contribute to renewables construction cost, where they fall as their contribution to that cost does.)
Insurance for construction accidents, and disposal costs, are figured in: silicon panels and wind turbine blades are inert, so cheap to dispose of. CdTe panels and rare-earth magnets are valuable, already-refined chemicals, and are reclaimed.
Each cost alone makes nukes more expensive than alternatives. All added up, they make nukes ruinously expensive.
While the UK's nuclear power capacity is well down on its 1990s peak, it's hardly correct to say the UK has "largely" transitioned away from nuclear. A major new nuclear plant (Hinkley Point C) is under construction, and two more (Sizewell C and Bradwell B) seem to still be moving ahead.
If all three are completed, they would represent 8.6 GW of new nuclear capacity, significantly more than the combined capacity of all UK nuclear power stations today!
Germany had a SPD/Greens coalition. They decided to not renew the contracts with the nuclear power plants and phase them out (afaik they are allowed to run 25 years, then they need to renew that, sorry missing some vocubaulry here). The next government was CDU/FDP (Merkel 1), who decided to renew the contracts again and cancel the rpior government phase out plans. Couple of weeks later Fukushima happened. Merkel stood in front of parliament and said: "On a day like today, we can not say that nuclear power plants are safe. They are safe." That is a direct quote of her speech. In the de speech she annoinced that Germany will stop using nuclear power.
Because they had just signed the renewed contracts, the power plant companies sued Germany for the lost profit. Funnily enough, when Merkel decided to renew the contracts, they also introduced a tax on nuclear fuel, however the law had mistakes which made it unconstitutional and Germany had to pay back the taxes.
I still to this day believe that Schäuble messed up the law on purpose. It happened back during the economic crisis, when there were spending cuts on normal people stuff, and this tax was a part of the media circus of "the big corps also have to do their part". That first part is 100% fact, this last part is just my pet conspiracy theory tough :D
https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-former-chancellor-gerhard-sch...
https://www.politico.eu/article/outrage-germany-ex-chancello...
Also, Schröder and Merkel are from different parties, so it's hard to see how Schröders corruption influenced Merkel.
Probably a lot on the Merkel side that the public doesn't know. The people or groups who you don't think would ever be corrupt are some of the best to be corrupt in the first place.
Every time nuclear get discussed people jump between either hydrostorage or green hydrogen, but when people start discussing turning off the gas from Russia, there seems to be very little interests to actually replace gas with storage. The few calculations I have read over hydrostorage is that the amount of damns and land needed to replace all the gas plant capacity is unrealistic, and green hydro is almost 100 times more expensive than natural gas. Nuclear is expensive, but its not that expensive.
There is a strange thing with hydrostorage. To my knowledge there does not exist a single example of a commercial operation that buys renewables to pump water and then generate energy to sell when the price goes up. There does exist one commercial operation that I know where an energy company uses storage to balance their fleet of (mostly) fossil fuel plants when they need to spin down/up. It keeps their operations more stable, and they said something to the point of "In the future we might use this to buy renewables when the price is low and sell when the energy is needed".
You can start by first converting coal power plants to natural gas. That will cut the emissions by at least a factor of 2. Then, when the hydrogen infrastructure is built up, you replace the natural gas with hydrogen. Initially it can be "brown" hydrogen, but then you can transition to "blue" hydrogen, and finally with green hydrogen [1].
[1] https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/hydrog...
Look at the pebble bed reactors, or the smr reactors from nuscale, or the chinese molten salt reactor designs. These are all using new technology to make meltdown next to or completely impossible. Nuscale is calling their smr reactors "walk away safe" in that you could just abandon them and they're unable to melt down.
Saying we shouldn't consider nuclear energy due to Chernobyl is equivalent to saying we shouldn't use airplanes because of the hindenburg. It entirely ignores the massive amount of materials and nuclear science improvements since Chernobyl was built in 1970. I'm ALL FOR solar power (and have 48 x 440W bifacial solar panels aka 21.1kW on my barn), but it is not a holy grail. Safe modern nuclear energy could massively improve Europe's energy situation and end Russian energy dependence.
And modern reactors have to be built first. How long does it take if we look how long the berlin airport took or Stuttgart 21 will take.
That won't change even with modern reactors.
All safety protocols and safeguards were utterly ignored for profit. Here is an unbiased source on how spectacularly bad this was:
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p...
The Fukushima reactor as it was deployed would have never passed inspection in the US or EU, for literally the reasons that caused the unfortunate event to pass. It is like building an automobile in 2022 with no airbags, antilock-brakes, power steering, and seat belts. It just doesn't make any sense.
There are to many examples in the past where profit resulted in security protocol and standards not being adhered to.
Pointing out outliers isn't productive. What's the average time to completion of projects on that scale in Germany?
I believe part of the problem is that nuclear power proponents were claiming that nuclear power is safe before Chernobyl. Then Chernobyl happened.
Then proponents were claiming that that happened due to the way Chernobyl was designed, that the Western designs were entirely different, and that it couldn't happen.
Then it did happen in Fukushima. People don't care about "but the Tsunami" when what they heard before was "it cannot happen under any circumstance". (And even though that may not have been what was said I'm pretty sure that's how the claims were perceived).
After feeling that they have been lied to twice, it doesn't matter whther the new reactors are actually unable to melt down or not - people are not willing to take the chance that they're being lied to again.
https://carnegieendowment.org/2012/03/06/why-fukushima-was-p... here is an unbiased source on this and how it was utterly preventable.
The big difference is the need for active cooling in both Fukushima and Chernobyl. The new ones don’t need that.
I know that sounds like the same thing as “an rbmk reactor cannot explode”, but that’s very dismissive of decades of work since then by people completely unrelated to those responsible for past disasters. All major nuclear disasters or near disasters like three mile island were from old systems which used active cooling.
The energy output of nuclear is unmatched, its safer than it used to be, and I’m pretty sure most of the expense comes from red tape. I think its good to have learned some hubris from past mistakes, but abandoning that technology would be like abandoning spaceflight. The star trek motto is not “to responsibly stay where we already are.”
When it comes down to the raw physics, I don’t see how most renewables can compete. It seems like the cost effectiveness is being distorted by subsidies for renewables and red tape for nuclear. If renewables actually are cost competitive now or close too it and can legitimately be used without requiring energy rationing and causing grid problems, thats great, but I don’t really see how that’s possible.
At the end of the day I don’t really care whats generating power, I just think it’s foolish to not try to have as much as possible, and I don’t see how something as energy dense as nuclear wouldn’t be massively beneficial.
In Chernobyl's case, it was inadequate training of their staff for a test procedure (including various side effects that this test procedure might cause) and some overrides of safety systems (in gross violation of existing regulations).
In Fukushima Daiichi's case, it was management ignoring the very real risk of tsunamis, even in the face of plenty of evidence that the station was vulnerable to such (a handful of other stations around the world had been damaged by tsunamis in the preceding dozen or so years, and only fared much better because of more redundancies in their emergency systems).
Because it was and still is safe. Planes crash too, does that mean they're not safe?
Nothing is 100% safe, that'd be ridiculous. The point is that nuclear energy is the safest, by a huge margin.
> people are not willing to take the chance that they're being lied to again.
Well yes, the general public is irrational. We need politicians with balls that will do the right thing regardless of the ignorant public perceptions.
The problem is these modern reactors you mention, the ones that do actually exist in the real world and are not just designs, are not really all that modern. Consider every nuclear power reactor ever brought online, ever. Nearly all of them were built awhile ago and are of the early design where if the plant loses power, yada yada yada, when the batteries run dry, the plant is at risk of meltdown. Towards the end of the nuclear boom, changes in design were implemented, and some plants were built in the US that won't break that way... and this was idk like 50 years ago.
The US and UK development of fission power was a very Big Investment, and I think they did a good job because they ferreted out the least expensive method of generating power with a nuclear reaction, which unfortunately for nuclear power, not only because of the relatively recent (last 20 years) much much much much much smaller investments (compared to US&UK investment in developing nuclear power) in renewable energies like solar and wind, electricity generated in the cheapest possible way from a nuclear reaction can not complete any longer in the energy market (and in fact never could, nuclear was always too expensive, but for a while didn't matter [1]), and this is before we take into account the skyrocketing prices of uranium or the cost of long term storage of waste, and this of course is all long before investors ever show up that want to build and run one of the much newer reactor designs that can't melt down and also produce less waste, because those are even more expensive to build than the old designs that make up nearly all of Earth's global fleet of nuclear reactors, which can melt down and btw they are, all of them, at waste storage capacity... for more than 20 years (iow, their "temporary" waste storage is more or less overflowing with nuclear waste, and has been for quite awhile).
We need to solve nuclear power, but this isn't rushing to build new plants, it is instead biting the bullet to tie off the loose ends of all the damn messes already made with nuclear power, which are considerable but not impossible to fix and keep fixed.
Nuclear power isn't dead. Someone could come up with a damn cheap, safe and much simper design, and when that day comes, we'll all have our own little nuclear reactors, and it will be a great day.
[1] The US, for a brief period, needed fuel for nuclear bombs. Someone somewhere vastly overestimated this need, and in this overestimation, there was a lot of money available to build nuclear power plants, and a lot of them... err... all of them... in consideration of how crazy expensive nuclear power just is and always was... that's how and why they got built — and not because some visionaries thought that nuclear power would solve the energy needs of the country. IOW the reason we have the nuclear power plants that we do in the US is because of the vastly mindbogglingly huge overestimation of the need for fuel for nuclear bombs. Many think you can never have enough ammo, but please trust that we have far more than enough now, the nuclear bomb fuel factories aren't doing well, economically speaking, having effectively lost their major client, the US military, who themselves will, btw, continue to build and operate fission nuclear reactors indefinitely, regardless of expense for valid reasons.
Properly designed reactors don't make any waste: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing
> not mine uranium any more since 2021, so needs to buy them
A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor plus the above mentioned technology reduces the need for Uranium by around 98%, so no need to buy any.
This is a solved problem, any issues are financial and emotional, not technical.
Then Chernobyl happened. Germany was, and is to this day, directly affected by the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. (Many of the boar hunted in Germany are considered unsafe to eat due to high radiation levels).
People remember when they were wondering if they should abort their pregnancies because they weren't sure if they'd give birth to a child with three arms, or too afraid to drink the milk, etc. - most of these fears turned out to be unfounded, but that doesn't mean that people weren't affected by them and remember them deeply.
The Green movement had also built its entire identity around it, making it hard to go back on it.
Fukushima sealed the deal because nuclear power was advertised as safe, not "well it explodes sometimes but the actual damage is less than from coal", any thus the safety claims lost all credibility.
Sad thing is, Germany should have pumped a whole lotta more money into renewables and their research.
People citing Chernobyl and Fukushima strikes me as rhe equivalent to people citing the Hindenburg when talking about flying; I’m pretty sure both reactor designs could be thought of as the design equivalent to the hydrogen blimp. People’s minds are stuck on an image of a blimp on fire when thinking about flying even though modern passenger jets exist.
So the problem isn't unknown unknowns, but people simply don't caring enough about potential consequences?
That just makes it worse and nuclear an even less of an option.
The Energiewende makes them one of a tiny handful of countries worldwide that is actively interested in alleviating greenhouse gases.
And I hope the Ukraine issue will lead to more and not switching back to nuclear again.
But with the Greens in the government, chances are good.
However, if it would help to bring down the sick Putin regime in Russia I would support a limited extension.
EDIT: Russian trolls be downvoting me. Idi nahui.
That's already coming to Germany, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solare_Baupflicht. Not legislated in the whole country yet, but that's just a matter of time now.
Farm and pasture land shared with solar panels yield more than without. Wind turbines can also be placed in farm and pasture land, displacing very little production.
As I understand it, Germany already has a great deal of wind power installed.
From what I can find, the capital cost of a new nuclear plant is somewhere on the order of $6M-9M/MW.
On the other hand, a 3MWh grid battery from Tesla runs about $1M. So ignoring cloudy days and just considering providing power overnight (in the winter), you'd need about 14 hours of capacity, so about $14M to provide 3MW, or roughly $5M/MW.
So, in terms of initial capital cost, just the battery portion to handle the overnight gap in solar production would be roughly equivalent to the cost of nuclear, but of course that doesn't account for the cost of the solar panels, nor for the fact that there will be other periods when generation is low. (Although these can be partially dealt with by over-building the renewable generation and using wind as well as solar.) However, the other issue is that the lifespan of grid-connected lithium ion batteries appears to be about 5-15 years, whereas nuclear plants should generally last several decades at least.
So, batteries + renewables are more expensive in terms of capital than nuclear plants, which are themselves quite expensive, but I must admit I'm surprised that the difference isn't even greater. I expect part of the problem is production capacity. You can build a 1100MW nuclear plant, but I expect it would be nearly impossible to buy a 14GWh of grid batteries because the capacity to build them in that scale just doesn't exist, yet at least. Also, as others have mentioned, you'd need a lot of space.
There are other methods of storage that are used, pumped hydro being the most common in large scale, but requiring specific geography. There are other options like gravitational storage with shafts and weights or carts on tracks or what have you, but they're all expensive and/or difficult to scale.
For the forseeable future all cell production is going to go into cars because Tesla has fat enough margins to absorb increases in battery costs while utility scale storage can't.
Elon’s literal words mention this: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/musk-vows-to-accelerate-tes...
Practical alternatives to underground hydrogen include liquified air (also industrially useful after the tanks fill), anhydrous ammonia, underground compressed air (again, compressed hydrogen is even more useful), pumped underground hydro, pumped undersea hydro, iron-air batteries (which are extremely cheap, and safe) and even deep mine-shaft gravitational (again, also compatible with hydrogen, compressed air, and compressed hydrogen).
Underground hydro is even more attractive than the mountaintop variety because the head may be thousands of meters.
[0] https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/nuclear-new-build-projects/...
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
> Within days of the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, large anti-nuclear protests occurred in Germany. Protests continued and, on 29 May 2011, Merkel's government announced that it would close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022.[7][8] Political writer David Frum characterized Merkel's decision as a political move to improve her approval ratings which had sagged after the post 2008 financial crisis bailout of southern Europe by Germany.
Regardless if things were in motion before, the decision to phase out was for a political gain. The rest of the story one can write themselves.
It put the country on the course we have today. It will be very interesting to see how the greens trot around that.
And there is this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...