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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

We've all raised our concerns about the opinions of Germans before on these threads. A brilliant scientific nation that seems to have become recently confused. Sort of like the British.

Green Gas? Nuclear is bad because it produces waste despite that waste often being the size of a can of coke after a year of service? Buying Russian gas is actually making Russia more democratic and drawing it in to the West?

The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore -- so I'm going to wait for that tide of opinion change rather than try to persuade anymore. Being naive sometimes is a luxury some can simply afford while others can't afford it. Climate change is happening and it's not going to wait for Germany, Russia has always been like Russia -- corrupt and unreliable. Amazing that Germany have considered the US a poor partner under Trump but a reliable one with Russia/Putin. France seems have better answers on how to solve energy problems than Germany.

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> The past week will have a lot of Germans revising many silly opinions they were originally able to afford but not anymore

Honestly, as a German myself I'm rather doubtful of that unfortunately. Some? Maybe. Many? Probably not. I cannot even convince my parents (who grew up in Germany during the time when the anti nuclear sentiment really started) to rethink their anti nuclear stance (despite having a great relationship with them). I say that as a physicist that absolutely sees there are flaws with aging nuclear plants.

But people who are not able to a) appreciate the energy density of nuclear and b) see that climate change is an urgent problem we face, whereas any issues from nuclear waste are long term problems (not even talking about future reactor technologies etc. etc.) is just... I don't know? It sounds insane, but indoctrinated? I just utterly fail to understand.

I mean, what's the point of a "nuclear waste free Earth" if our civilization collapses due to climate change?

Why oppose nuclear and renewables? It's about getting rid off fossil fuels isn't it? It's like focusing on competition among EV manufacturers when they are tiny compared to ICE. Take a step back.

> Why oppose nuclear

I'm not sure anyone here will have a good answer for you, but anti-nuclear sentiment in Germany is incredibly strong.

Maybe the problem with the "green" nuclear energy is that we still do not have a final waste site for it. This stuff may not be much in terms of size, but it is bad for hundreds of thousands of years and can contaminate a lot of water.

> I mean, what's the point of a "nuclear waste free Earth" if our civilization collapses due to climate change?

That is a bit panic-fuelled and frankly even religious, while completely ignoring the immediate threat of radiation, which cannot be reversed for hundreds of thousands of years.

PS.: Climate change is going to happen whatever we do. This happened even before we existed.

> while completely ignoring the immediate threat of radiation, which cannot be reversed for hundreds of thousands of years.

Waiting hundreds of thousands of years is the simplest way to reverse the "threat of radiation". Each radioactive isotope has a half-life; if you wait ten half-lives, the "threat of radiation" is reduced by a thousand times, and the isotopes with very long half-lives aren't that radioactive to start with (roughly simplifying, the shorter the half-life, the more intense the radiation).

I fail to understand why people like nuclear so much.

Risks aside, renewables are cheaper. So why use an outdated technology like nuclear?

(Now, fission would be a different story. I am all for researching this intensively).

I guess you mean fusion. Fission is what we currently have/use for power plants. Even there research might end up in a better solution, because nuclear energy is actually a good source of energy because it is so dense. But current implementations of fission are really hard to recommend over even coal power plants.

I can not see, technologically, how we could have a functioning 100% renewable world today. I can see this with nuclear. It's that simple. That is why I'm backing anything that brings more nuclear power online.

Regardless, it's not either nuclear or renewables. It should be a combination that works.

You need to back up Sun and Wind with either some type of Battery or Nuclear/Carbon based solution. If not you have no energy reliability when sun/wind conditions are bad. More sun and wind renewables won't help in this case as they have this built-in problem.

Apart from that, it is not like big windmills and sun farms have zero impact on the environment. In this case a nuclear factory might be big and ugly, but globally its immediate impact on nature might be a lot less than the aforementioned renewables.

1 kg of natural uranium gives 45,000 kWh of electricity; so the extraction of raw materials for nuclear has less impact on nature as well compared to many other solutions (e.g. for the same amount of electricity you would need nearly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal). [1]

Of course with nuclear you have problems with storage of waste and possible accidents, but its positive impact on climate change, great capacity for producing electricity and lower impact on nature than many other solutions, might make it the best solution we have at the time being?

[1] https://www.euronuclear.org/glossary/fuel-comparison/

Because renewables alone don’t replace nuclear or fossil fuel plants. Renewables with enough battery backup could, but then it’s no longer as available or cheap.

Nuclear is much better suited for base load power than solar and wind. Take a look at this graph of German energy by source and Tw/H.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/Fil...

For all their good intentions of replacing nuclear with something cleaner and safer, you can see wind and solar grow, but not enough to offset the nuclear decrease. Natural gas consumption grows more to replace it. “Solar and wind instead of nuclear” is a false dichotomy because one can’t just swap out one with the other, at least not until grid batteries are far more available.

Nuclear works now. A 100% renewable grid will require energy storage. We have small scale options for energy storage, but none of the current energy storage technology we have now scales large enough to meet the demands of a 100% renewable grid.

Remember that heating in most of Europe is provided by natural gas. The primary need for heat is during the nighttime. Solar works only during the day, wind works great at dawn and dusk but not particularly well at night, and both of these systems have inherent unpredictability. You never know that there isn't some weather pattern that's going to take all your solar/wind down to 30% of its normal capacity for a week. Hydro and geothermal may fit the bill, but AFAIK Germany and Europe in general doesn't have the capacity.

The ultimate goal is a 100% renewable grid consisting of an energy storage system which will work all night, and will be recharged by solar and wind when those systems are operating at peak capacity. Natural gas heating will be replaced by heat pumps with a fallback to electric resistive heating when temperatures drop too low for a heat pump to be effective. Right now, there is no such energy storage system that will scale to meet these needs.

We'll get there one day, but until then, we need an energy generation technology that works all day every day with no dependencies on weather, and scale to the size of a continent. The only -- the only -- technologies that currently exist which do this are coal, natural gas, and nuclear. Pick one. You must pick one -- platitudes about renewable energy and technology which may or may not exist in a decade will not prevent the pipes from freezing tonight.

Right now, Germany has chosen coal and natural gas, and has phased out nuclear. IMHO this was the wrong choice.

(Before anyone says Germany has phased out coal, they have not phased out coal. Germany mines coal, selling coal to Poland, Poland uses coal to produce electricity, Germany buys electricity from Poland.)

> (Now, fission would be a different story. I am all for researching this intensively).

I suspect you meant fusion; I don't normally point out typos, but in this case, I think it's important.

There is also https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/datteln-4-coal-fir... , delivering about 400MW into the 16 2/3Hz electricity net of the Deutsche Bahn. Though apparently it uses most modern, efficient and environmentally friendly technology. At least they say so.

/me thinks of the green instead read stripe of some Inter City Expresses and giggles :)

There are quite a lot of valid concerns against nuclear power. As you wrote, the current generation was aging and would not have operated much longer anyway. There are valid concerns about nuclear waste (we just don't have a solution, but if that was the only thing, I would also argue, lets solve that problem another day). There are valid concerns about operational safety and due to recent events, even huge concerns about what happens when a nuclear reactor gets hit by a rocket. Lets hope we don't find out in Ukraine.

But the argument which makes the discussion now mostly irrelevant is simply: all available and reasonable designs are vastly expensive and take at least a decade to build, if not two including planning. That makes the question just moot. Not even France, which is all-in on nuclear has an answer to that.

Renewables are comparatively cheap and can be set up quickly. Germany already depends to a large part on renewable electricity. That is the cheap and efficient way forward. On top of that, nuclear power plants don't work well together with renewables, as they can't switch their output level enough.

Gas is the ideal partner for renewables and eventually will also be produced from renewable energy. Just recent events messed up the plan a bit, but not too much. We have to push quicker for renewables and pay a bit more for gas.

> nuclear waste (we just don't have a solution

Yes we do. I post this is almost every thread about nuclear power, and it seems I find new people each time.

If you combine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor you have essentially zero nuclear waste, and you also need something like 98% less Uranium.

This is a completely solved problem.

> On top of that, nuclear power plants don't work well together with renewables, as they can't switch their output level enough.

This isn't true either.

It's like everyone's opinion of nuclear power is stuck in the past, and no one can ever update their info.

Please point me out to any operating breeding reactor and how much nuclear fuel it can process. The French shut down their breeding reactors long ago, the only existing ones I know of are Russian, right now they are an even worse reference. I don't doubt they could be built, but the question is, what would they cost?

Please point me out to a nuclear reactor design that can be switched from 100% to 0% in the matter of hours and back again.

Well, talk about not updating your info. The vision of reprocessing + breeder reactors is straight out of 1960. Several countries spent many billions and many decades trying to make it work, and discovered that it was safer and cheaper to keep using conventional light water reactors. Nothing has really changed that makes this concept more feasible.

If we can not put some m3 into a robust container and burry it some km underground safely we really should reconsider our capability of running an advanced civilization.

This is a much harder problem than it might seem. You would need to find an underground storage site, where you can rule out any geological effects for a hundred millennia. In those time frames, even rigid rock moves quite a bit. There is no container solid enough, it can't be crushed. You would need to prevent any water coming to that place and carry the contamination away.

Germany stored some nuclear waste in a salt mine, that turned into a huge debacle after only 30 years requiring now an immensely expensive recovery operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine

Oops.

They did put it in a salt mine that was prone to water intrusions and not stable because it was mined/hollowed out. Maybe just dont do that without giving up the whole concept.

Over those time frames that you mentioned the waste mostly the toxic properties are important. Btw how are we handling all that toxic chemical waste that is going to be toxic and dangerous not only for hundreds but thousands of millenia. Maybe we could just put it there.

It is difficult for me to judge what exactly were wrong and why they thought it was a good idea to put that stuff there. But I do think they honestly thought it was a good idea and that scares me. That it is so easy to make severe mistakes which in hindsight might look silly. We don't have any long time experience with this and won't have it, as we basically have to deal now with the waste.

Could we shoot it into space little my little?

Exactly this. All justifications for nuclear are always qualified with "if done properly|safely|correctly..." and no nuclear reactor incident was predicated with any sort of warning about safety or impropriety.

The reality is that our world is inherently too unstable for the half century commitment necessary for each reactor. External influences always drive risky decisions which ultimately result in less than completely safe outcomes for both the operation of the reactor and the containment of the waste.

>Honestly, as a German myself I'm rather doubtful of that unfortunately. Some? Maybe. Many? Probably

There has been a historic reversal in German foreign and security policy this week! Germans are already revising their opinions about Russia, climate, energy, defense and what the government and media espouse since they may have been the original impetus in forming their opinions.

And on top of that :

I think its more likely that we find a technical solution to radioactive waste then find a technical solution to a destroyed world (aka 3 Celsius hotter)

France doesn't have any good answer on how to solve energy problems. Yes, they currently have a large amount of nuclear reactors - probably the most nuclear industry nation on the planet. However, most of them are aging and so far they fail to build new plants at a rate to sustain their production long term. They have 1 in construction, much delayed and with huge cost overruns. Even if they build another 10 that only delays the switch, they would have to replace 50 nuclear power plants. Their nuclear future so far depends on prolonging the run times of the existing plants.

France has 50 plants? They need to go headfirst into modular reactors.

Usually I would say that nuclear research and development dollars are wasted: they just displace purchasing solar/wind/storage. But with that big of an extant installed base, with approved/regulated sites and various other infrastructure, they may be the only country that can save money staying nuclear.

Of course, being a LFTR stan I would push for mass manufactured LFTRs the size of a couple shipping containers that can be decommissioned on a regular basis. 50 big nuclear plants replaced with about 1000 or more shipping container sized reactors on a replacement schedule.

LFTR would reduce waste, and separation of other fission products could be done elsewhere.

WHat is the French resistance to LFTR? I know that the US has strange bureaucratic resistances to LFTR built into academic funding and their regulatory agencies as an artifact of the ORNL reactor vs PWR reactor politics from the 1950s.

If France just piggybacking on the solid fuel rod reprocessing industry of the US and its same resistance to new reactor designs?

None of these modular "blueprint reactors" has been build. not a single one is producing power on gridscale.

You are correct, but nuclear is weird: it has so many regulatory and NIMBY hurdles that change is hard.

However, what has happened is that many many people have taken a swing at scalable reactors for a long time in the design phase.

And we do know the test ORNL reactor for MSR/LFTR practically fit in a closet, at least for the actual reactor.

So there is an opportunity.

The U.S. Navy has a few hundred samples built. They just put boats around them.

Its 56 even. That is a huge fleet to replace. I am not in the details of their decisions, but I think one can simply conclude that if a nation, which is so all-in on nuclear like France, doesn't have a good answer yet, it seems to be a non-trivial problem. France has their own fuel reprocessing industry and had breeding reactors in the past but gave up on them.

Yes but even those problems are far easier to handle than the ones of renewables. On one side we have investment problems, large scale planning issues, political issues, workforce issues. On the other side we simply have the tech ... just not existing at all (and nobody knows if it will).

Current rollout of renewables in France has also been a financial disaster and I don't see many people talking about that.

>Yes but even those problems are far easier to handle than the ones of renewables.

I don't think so. Look at UK's recent transition to renewables. They're making big moves nowadays, but we only talk about Germany. France is going backwards (it was an excellent idea to build nuclear plants after WW2, but not so much today compared to renewables' plunging cost and progress in energy storage).

France's renewable story has also been a disaster, 120 billions euros invested (half of the total cost of the whole nuclear grid (!) ) for 5% of the electricity production. Even Flamanville isn't as bad as that, there's hope it'll be good for future plants, that was just completely wasted.

France needs renewables, if they don't want to ruin themselves and build 150 additional reactors. If they want to become carbon neutral at some point...

"On the other side we simply have the tech ... just not existing at all (and nobody knows if it will)."

What tech doesn't exist in your opinion? P2G is tech with "large scale planning issues".

> France needs renewables, if they don't want to ruin themselves and build 150 additional reactors. If they want to become carbon neutral at some point...

As I said in another comment, France's investment in renewable has actually been even worse in terms of results than Flamanville. 120 billions euros (half of the cost of the whole nuclear grid) for 5% of the production, you can't really go lower than that.

In terms of carbon, the other European countries have a lot to catchup to reach France's level. They currently fight very hard against carbon pricing because well, that would mean the french industry would have an edge compared to them...

P2G just isn't good enough for now, let's be fair.

> France's investment in renewable has actually been even worse in terms of results than Flamanville.

so what? France inefficiently invests into renewables, thus renewables aren't the answer and we wait for a miracle?

> P2G just isn't good enough for now, let's be fair.

what does good enough mean? not as cheap as burning subsidized natural gas?

It looks like solar capacity has been ramping up fairly steadily[1] in France in recent years, from near-zero around 2007 - perhaps that's a sign of progress?

(and regarding apparent investment issues: is that definitely a case of poor financial results, or could it be that large up-front investments were required in order to foster development, and that the returns are just beginning?)

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_France

Per capita I believe they do, total amount the US has about 50% more capacity(which is a shame given how much bigger we are than France). we should have a lot more if we were serious about global warming.

I look forward to the day when renewables provide >90% of our energy, and old men on the Internet are still bloviating that it can't be done. As for me, I'm looking at pallets of solar panels on eBay to expand our PV system.

Leben mit der Energiewende TV! https://www.youtube.com/c/LebenmitderEnergiewende

I'll believe it when the tech for that will exist, you can't bet the future of the country on non-existing tech which might come up from R&D

What is the tech that doesn’t exist?

The tech exists today with solar, wind, batteries, transmission, hydro (pumped and otherwise), demand response, and electrification using heat pumps and EVs.

We're not waiting on anything groundbreaking, no heroic technologies are needed. There is no magic. It's just a matter of manufacturing/install capacity and funds. It's like insulation for buildings: not sexy, but it works and it's a known quantity. Work backwards from first principles based on how much energy the Sun delivers to the planet.

US: https://gspp.berkeley.edu/faculty-and-impact/news/recent-new...

Australia: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2017.05.168

Europe: https://www.energyplan.eu/smartenergyeurope/ | https://www.irena.org/publications/2018/Feb/Renewable-energy... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...

Central/South America: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173820

(if anyone has other resources for geographies I didn't mention, please comment with them to contribute to the knowledge graph!)

There's no battery which can handle months of consumption of a whole country and hydro is built to full capacity already

> There's no battery which can handle months of consumption

Why would this be necessary except in extreme environments (which don't exist in Germany)?

If solar produces 0 watts in Germany for an entire month we're all dead anyways.

The sun isn't likely to change, the lowest production of solar will always be on winter ... where you need the most electricity.

Right now https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/DE as an indication, Germany is at around 30% production of their solar capacity.

Yes, but in the winter wind is quite strong. There will be large storage needs, but mostly in the range of days. The electricity networks are connected all over Europe and production and consumption is already handled on an European level. This will extend more and together with the built-up of much capacity mean, that storage needs are not as high as some put them.

With wind they are other issues, it's very unpredictable far ahead, you need a lot of places to put them and it's already at maximum theoretical efficiency already after 100 years of evolution so there's not even a hope it will improve unlike solar.

At the end yeah you can get out of all of these issues by building 10x the required capacity, but that is reflected on the price and the space to build all of this though.

so you store the energy using hydrogen, and import energy in form of hydrogen from southern regions

that further decreases the efficiency and it's not feasible to store even a month of usage with that.

why not? Germany used to store much higher amounts of gas: https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Artikel/Energy/gas-instrume....

Right. And switching heating to heat pumps driven mostly by renewables will mean a large reduction in gas required in total.

We've pulled awful lot of natural gas out of the ground, it seems like there ought to be room for more than a months worth down there.

Wind generators still are getting more efficient - partly because they are still improving, especially in the generator part, but mostly because they are becoming larger and the wind gets stronger the higher you are above ground. And yes, we will need to build more of them, many more. We don't need 10x of the required capacity, but more than the required capacity and then put the excess energy into storage. And of course it always will be a mix of wind and solar.

well, wind has the highest production in the winter, and hydrogen can basically be stored forever

There was an article a while back talking about running a transmission line from Chile to China so summer, desert sun in Chile could be used to generate solar energy to heat China during the winter. I read (was an HN posted article) either within that article or in the comments that transmission losses would only be ~30%. I wonder if solar panels in North Africa could generate electricity to be consumed during German winter?

As an owner of a small domestic p.v. system, with lithium storage (not for economical reasons but to protect against eventual long blackouts) I with who say tech does not exist.

First there is a bit stability issue: when a load start to consume (zero feed in or on-battery/autonomous scenario) the solar inverter demand time (seconds!) to ramp up, when the load stop the solar inverter still feed too much power and we do not have ready available "super-condenser" (when a load pops-up) and "energy sponges" (when a load stop), the result is a not stable microgrid. IF we have a large enough grid where spike loads are not really spike than perhaps we can have stability but such kind of grid for solar and wind it's not there, the so called "smart grid" do exists only on paper.

Secondly all p.v. systems I know are sold as commercial product, but they prove to be more like initial prototypes, to make the microgrid stable software is much used, and in general it's correct name should be crapware. ModBUS RTU is the most monitoring-and-control universal protocol, in most cases with a crappy load of various kind of "bridge" (generally from classic serial to USB or to TCP) and being pull-based it's normally not suitable at microgrid scale. CanBUS is used for quicker communication and is used much like car's ODB: there is a standard, but almost all vendor "extend" it as they wish so interoperability is crappy. Even the most open of the p.v. systems I know of (Victron, witch base it's system on Debian and publish all the code) is an incredible pile of python glue code and scripts that can't be really considered "production ready". All such systems also are designed to live connected to the OEM, some are even hard to use without internet connectivity to their "home". Some even have hard-coded passwords with non-deactivable wifi, hard-coded per entire model series, like BYD batteries, an ideal target for a casual wardriver.

First: something can be "stored", for instance I have enough hot water to heat it just with solar (as long as there is enough day-to-day production), that's very good and ultimately easy, it's just about have enough space for a big boiler. Electricity on contrary can't be stored much: batteries are hyper-expensive and do not really last that longer. Most stressed batteries last 5 years, most 8 years, few perhaps can arrive at 10 but I'm not much convinced. Long story short, there is enough tech to power up few homes, built with proper insulation and implants etc to run that way, there is almost nothing at industry demand scale, not even to made such systems themselves.

The following about the sentiment towards nuclear power in Germany:

- Germany is a densely populated country and Germans have always been sensitive towards environmental pollution. - Nuclear fallout is a reality as every consumer of mushrooms from Bavarian forests knows that are still today contaminated with caesium-137. - Finding a secure final storage for nuclear waste has failed. The front-runner in Gorleben proved to be unreliable after decades of serving as a temporary storage. - Most Germans believe that their country would have been obliterated if a nuclear war between East and West had turned hot. - Most Germans find that nuclear power generation comes with the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

From this vantage point, nuclear is not all that attractive.

> Nuclear is bad because it produces waste despite that waste often being the size of a can of coke after a year of service?

The history of the German anti-nuclear movement is quite long, Chernobyl has essentially put a stop on new investments and killed any ongoing research for good (see THTR-300). This is also due to the ecological impact it had on Germany.

And now, because of this stop in new investments, Germany ended up with reactors stuck somewhere in between 1960 and 1980. Critical issues went unaddressed, the control rooms are cold war era time machines, incidents were swept under the rug for fear of it finally dropping the sword of damocles on the industry. Operators showed gross negligence all around (especially Vattenfall, who are now suing the German government over the phase out) and it's a small wonder we've not had a more serious incident (though significantly larger incidence of leukemia around Krümmel should probably be considered serious).

Nuclear is not happening here. The best we can hope for is keeping our fossil fuels mostly off and buying nuclear power from France until renewables are viable on their own (if ever).

> This is also due to the ecological impact it had on Germany.

What impact did it had on the environment in Germany?

See here for example: https://www.thelocal.de/20100729/28819/

Tell me about the answers of France They have more than 50 plants, partly very old and due for shutdown, supplying 70% of ELECTRICAL energy. They want to build up to 14 new ones. Well and don't expect them before 2040

So now tell me how this answers going climate neutral.

>So now tell me how this answers going climate neutral.

Because Nuclear energy emits a tiny fraction of the Co2 that fossil fuels emit for the same energy.

and how are they going to get rid of it?

Preferably react it again in a 'fast' reactor and get the other 90% of the energy out. And after that bury it for a much shorter amount of time than traditional waste requires, since it isn't as high in energy.

In a more considered manner than the billions of tonnes of carbon and crap polluting our environment causing the greenhouse effect. A small bit of nuclear waste can be buried deep in a secure location.

I am talking about fossil energy

You are mixing topics here and please restrain yourself with the "royal we" here. Some of us don't simply don't share your beliefs.

The mistake the Germans made, which they are now correcting, is over reliance on Russian gas to bridge the brief gap to energy neutrality. Though, in fairness, until Putin's melt-down last week, he could have saved that deal and kept on milking the Germans for billions for quite some time. Such melt-downs have not been seen in international politics since Trump reluctantly disappeared from it last year. You might say that Putin (whom Trump referred to as a 'genius' just last week) has trumped Trump in that respect.

Basically, the fix for Germany is importing expensive natural gas from the US and elsewhere as a stop gap solution while accelerating the move away from burning that to clean up the energy sector and lower cost.

That's what they just announced. 80% renewables eight years from now and 100% five years later. They are over 50% right now. Also, a recession is a great time to inject some capital into your economy. And of course the Germans have a healthy economy and low debt; unlike certain other countries. And of course they export a lot of their renewable tech to others; like the US.

Also, France and Germany have connected grids. So, with Germany producing lots of wind powrr and France providing nuclear base-load, both will be fine. No need for Germany to build nuclear plants. And no need for France to build a lot more plants either when they can import cheap German renewables to complement their expensive nuclear supply. The math to get rid of coal and natural gas in fifteen years actually adds up.

Maybe that is the end goal of this nonsense. Make Jan 6 look like a forgivable hiccup compared to loosing 200k armed conscripts. Suddenly Trump looks rational by comparison.

Importing gas from the US looks difficult given how polluting cargo ships are and the complete lack of capacity.

It's not nonsense if they get it done. 2035 is only 13 years away. That might be within the governing period of the current chancellor.

Importing gas even with the pollution associated with shipping it in is still better than burning lignite; which actually affects the health of lots of people in Germany and France (depending on winds). That's what they are trying to get rid off in the next eight years or so. Shutting down coal is the number 1 priority as it is by far the most polluting. If they could have done that with Russian gas that would have been better indeed. But that ship has sailed. Shutting down gas becomes the next priority after coal has been removed as a source of energy.

You keep on dragging in Trump. I'm not sure what your argument is other than that he did not do anything productive here other than promoting coal; which I would argue is indeed pure lunacy. Capacities can be scaled up if the price is right.

Do you have insight into why the chief of Greenpeace and an American is in charge of Germany climate? https://www.greenpeace.org/international/author/jennifer-mor...

Maybe she is being granted German citizenship to become Secretary of State.

There are some factual errors in what you stated. She isn't becoming the Secretary of State, but a high ranking official in the state department. Her role is to be a special envoy to discuss climate related topics with foreign states. Which absolutely makes sense as to stop climate change, an international effort needs to be made. The state department would be the obvious administration to conduct these talks and puts them on the same priority level as previously economical and military topics. But indeed, she needs to take up a German passport to become a state official.

Yep, it's a genius move by the Germans.

The actual secretary of state is from the Green party, Annalena Baerbock. She just deployed some great pragmatic & lateral thinking. They have an American lobbying as their official representative for their cause on the international stage and the US (obviously). And they export renewable tech to America. Win win. Move the cause further while doing some business.

I wouldn't necessarily have voted for the green party in Germany (I live here but I am not a German national), but this is both very rational and very smart. Loving it.

The discussions in the Bundestag streams the last couple days were pretty unified in their decision making. Germany is now going to up their military defenses, and that seems to be the highest priority.

The dependency on gazprom kind of put us in "Schach", so we as a country can't do anything (as the chancellor kind of admitted in his speech).

Historically, Schroeder has always been the direct bridge to Putin. And he knows how to hold the mutual respect that Putin expects from others.

It seems as the current ruling parties don't realize that this is a game of strategy, not a game of moral or emotions. You can't win against Putin with moral code, so I kind of fear that they make it worse and he'll hold a grudge against Germany.

Sometimes the threat of war and invasion cuts through a bunch of cruft and corruption. This is another miscalculation on Putin's side. Ukraine was the comfort blanket for Europe keeping them complacent.

This crossed an emotional line with the entirety of Europe. Heck, I feel it in the United States. Russia/Putin are nuts and not entirely rational. They are actual palpable evil: a direct threat to your survival and prosperity.

Remember the dogs thing with Merkel and Putin? I'm sure the "elites" of the EU have wanted to get more coordinated against Russia, but the populace was a bit ... soft.

Putin may have motivated far more people than just the populace of the Ukraine.

Looking at the map and the conduct of the war so far, this is a massive geopolitical opportunity for the West. Set fleets of drones into Ukraine and repulse the forces. Actually, I would sucker Belarus into invasion (they've already announced it, have they actually done it).

That would provide a casus belli for Ukraine (ahem NATO) forces to then invade Belarus, the other major buffer state between the NATO and Russia. Topple their autocrat.

Then put Belarus and Ukraine into NATO. Then there is a wall of NATO states at the doorstep of Russia.

I was thinking something similar recently. When an army leaves the safety of its homeland to invade another country, it becomes vulnerable to its supply lines being cut off and being stranded in a foreign country with lack of fuel, food/water, and/or ammo.

We’re already seeing scattered anecdotal examples of this happening to the Russian invasion force even without their supply lines being directly attacked. I wonder how difficult it would be for Western powers to assemble a fleet of drones, stick a bunch of Ukrainian flag decals on them, and then attack and disrupt the main Russian supply lines into Ukraine.

It would only take a few days of that before the Russian army runs out of material to fight the war with. Then Ukrainian troops can force a surrender, round them up, treat them appropriately under the Geneva Conventions, and then offer and encourage them to accept political asylum in the West. (Same with Belarus if they invade). Destroy or confiscate the materials.

Then boom, Russia no longer has an army. And without the West ever directly attacking the Russian (or Belorussian) homeland.

It seems last year one in five Russians were interested in asylum. Too bad the military likely avoids conscripting gays or domestic abuse victims or the Ukraine population would be increasing by every soldier sent in.

There is sort of a brother/sister relationship between the two countries and I suspect if the US agreed to float a basic income for a half a decade to defectors a good pamphlet drop on enemy troops could have them switching sides.

> Buying Russian gas is actually making Russia more democratic

Right now, autocratic Russia and Saudi Arabia are actively colluding to drive up oil prices during the invasion of Ukraine.

https://theintercept.com/2022/02/23/ukraine-russia-gas-price...

EDIT: I misread the tone of the original comment, and have updated my comment to reflect it.

I think the comment you're responding to was using that as an example of a "silly opinion" that needs revising.

Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated my comment to be illustrative rather than corrective.

Completely agree however that was the line German government officials were trotting out to justify buying fuel from Russia when other EU countries were rolling their eyes.

Just curious who is the biggest producer for nuclear fuel? ;)

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