Germany considers keeping nuclear power plants online | Hacker News Reader

Germany considers keeping nuclear power plants online

euractiv.com

181 pointsnixass136 comments

In the current context, it should be noted that the EU's dependence on Russia and its sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) for uranium is more or less compatible with that of coal, gas, and oil; for the US, it is even worse.

In 2020 only 0.5% of the uranium supply in the EU was domestic (+ 1.6% re-enriched), but the percentage from the Russian sphere of influence was as follows:[1]

    20.2 % Russia
    19.2 % Kazakhstan
     2.6 % Uzbekistan

    Total: 42.0 %

The figures for the US in 2020 were as follows:[2]

    16 % Russia
    22 % Kazakhstan  
     8 % Uzbekistan
 
    Total: 46 %

[1] Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2] Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...

Fuel is a much smaller fraction of the total cost of energy generation for nuclear power, though. If natural gas prices doubles, the price of electricity from gas turbine plants doubles. If uranium prices double because no one will buy it from Russia any more, the price of nuclear electricity goes up what, 5 or 10 percent?

Can anyone else increase production? Do we have stockpiles? If not the price of that electricity goes up to whatever Russia wants it to until we just stop using the reactors for lack of fuel. (Note: I don't know the answer to those questions, they aren't rhetorical)

Australia has large amounts of uranium (in the ground), for example. Russia and former Soviet states are not the only suppliers.

Yeah, one of the most productive uranium mine in the world is an Australian copper mine that happens to intersect a uranium deposit

> Can anyone else increase production?

Almost every producer can, there are some processing steps before shipping (uranium is generally shipped as yellowcake), but for the most part it's pretty straightforward mining.

> Do we have stockpiles?

I'd expect most nuclear countries to have both a stockpile and a strategic reserve (especially if they use uranium in other contexts than civil energy).

For reference France has a 2 years stockpile and a 5 years strategic reserve. A country like germany which is trying to get out of nuclear might have reduced their stockpile to waste less money (as they'd have to resell it).

Talking about uranium, Czechoslovakia used to have big deposits. But due to being occupied by Soviet union, we were forced to give them all for free. The amount it was worth would have made huge difference in our economy for decades. Soviet union never recognized this, Russia later recognized something but not really, and paid less than 0.5% of the value of it.

Yeah, there are countries where Russia might be viewed in positive light (like Serbia from what I've heard), but for sure it ain't former communist countries invaded and occupied by soviets. We were just fucked by them continuously, for 41 years, left and right and much more. And for these last 20 years Russia waged quite intense (not only) psy-ops war on whole Europe including us.

This whole hatred Russia is getting now, well they laid all the groundwork long time ago for that and put some good continuous efforts in it. It just took something so horrible as now for it to crystalize and spill over.

The huge difference is uranium sources are pretty varied geopolitically: about 45% of resources are in western countries (mainly Australia and Canada), 20% in the BRICS, and about 35% elsewhere (which would include some countries within the russian sphere of influence). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r... lists the top 10 as Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia, South Africa, Niger, Russia, China, Brazil, Greenland in that order (with Ukraine coming in at 11th), at current market prices.

And since it doesn't use pipelines it's much easier to get your shipments of yellowcake from a different country. It'll probably be a bit more expensive, but not "widespread fuel shortage" expensive.

Uranium is also easy to store (especially once refined), so you can have pretty massive reserves (IIRC France keeps at least 2 years worth of uranium stocked within its territory plus a strategic reserve worth 3~5 years of consumption).

That's mostly because it's cheap, and the US doesn't want to suffer the environmental cost (and political cost) of uranium mining.

Note that the US has Uranium reserves remaining, and countries like Canada, Australia, and the Ukraine have significant reserves. It will take time and effort to replace the supply chain for fuel, but it can be done.

Also, it's possible to produce nuclear fuel in breeder reactors, although this is plutonium rather than uranium and is a proliferation risk.

For a near term source of nuclear fuel if there's a shortage due to Russia et. al. not supplying, nuclear weapons contain highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and could be cannibalized in some amount to provide it.

As a bonus, nuclear reactors are carbon neutral, which itself should be reason enough to use them instead of Russian gas and oil.

Something I learned recently is that calling it "the Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine" is apparently using the Russian term for the country, rather than the country's own term for themselves. Similarly the spelling Kyiv rather than Kiev is seemingly what the Ukrainians themselves prefer. This seems like a good time to switch to using non-colonial terms and spellings.

Good point. It can be a tough habit to break, because it seems to occupy the same part of my brain as "the UK".

I thought about it previously and found it kinda odd that it seems so natural to say 'the Ukraine' when usually that is only the case for 'acronym countries'. It sounds pretty ridiculous for example to say 'the Italy', and yet with Ukraine it's hard not to.

It's because Ukraine means borderlands. So it's literally "the borderlands" which makes sense.

This appears in lots of languages. In Germany Iran is "the Iran".

Oh interesting. Like the Netherlands.

> Something I learned recently is that calling it "the Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine" is apparently using the Russian term for the country

Russian doesn't have articles: there is no the in Russian. The phrasing the Ukraine like the Netherlands has been used in English for well over a century. It's usually seen in cases where the name has a literal meaning in the original source language. Some like the Punjab have become archaic but some like the Deccan remain in use.

However, it's just good form to respect the official Ukranian preference and avoid the the.

Thanks for the correction, I didn't realize the term went back that far (but good point about the lack of articles). But at any rate, you're right, no matter where the term originated, it's still good form to respect the Ukrainian preference instead.

Can you give more details on this? I speak Russian and not sure I follow the idea here. There are no articles in Russian. Ukraine name in Russian is Украина. Is it because Russia use “the Ukraine” in English documents?

It’s not related to the language. It’s related to culture. Ukraine in Russian means frontier or borderlands. Calling it Ukraine simply means calling it a name. Calling it the Ukraine implies they’re calling it the frontier (of Russia).

It makes zero sense in the English language. But it’s just a micro resistance by a small country against a bigger dominant superpower and culture next to it.

True. But if required uranium is slightly easier to ship than natural gas, and a power plant doesn't consume much of it. A small plane from the US can transport all the uranium a reactor needs to function for one year easily!

I toured a US national lab that developed a method to extract uranium from seawater. Their results are frankly outstanding. Plastic fibers are cheaply impregnated with a binder than removes the uranium from the seawater. All you need to do is anchor long sections of the fibers in a high current area like a synthetic kelp bed, pull them onto a boat every few months, and rinse off the uranium with a mild acid (citric or weaker works). The cost analysis for this preliminary configuration estimated yellow cake production at 2x market rate. Last I heard they were working on ways to reduce costs and increase yields. For example, they were working with desalination plants to test extracting uranium from the concentrated effluent before discharge. The method does extract other valuable metals which can either be processed and sold, or returned to the ocean without issue.

Yes but uranium can be sourced from anywhere since it’s so compact. One is not tied to a pipeline like natural gas.

If the current supply is a result of production costs and market forces, rather than geological supply, then this shouldn't be an issue. My understanding is that there is plenty of uranium in the ground in Canada, but it's perhaps not economically viable due to competition from within the countries you mentioned.

This is not a fundamental issue. Let the market work.

Hopefully thorium SMR reactors will be a thing soon, as Norway has huge deposits of it. Won't help in the near future, though.

Ironically, the plan to finally shutting them down was made by the pro-nuclear conservative party.

Now, when the green party is in power, it's considered to stop the shut down again.

One of the founding premisses of the green party was to get rid of those power plants. They worked for decades to that goal.

This is not entirely true. The plan was made by the left and green in the beginning of the millennium, then canceled by the conservatives and after some years reapply by the conservatives, sold as their idea. Nice trick, though. :D

> Ironically, the plan to finally shutting them down was made by the pro-nuclear conservative party.

That is... not really true?

The plan to shut them down was initiated by the SPD following the SPD/Green election of '98. They also voted to ban the building of new plants.

When the CDU was elected in 2009, they decided to extend the existing plants' lifetimes by 8 to 14 years. This was quite unpopular, and if they went back on that idea following fukushima it was mostly because they were being hammered by the Greens (Baden-Wuttemberg went Green after 50 years of CDU rule).

When put to a vote, the only people who objected were Die Linke because they thought a 10 years deadline to shut down the plants was too long.

reality > utopia

realpolitik > ideology

You have to do what you have to do. The massive energy deficit Europe has always meant these policies of "renewables" were vaporware, and were going to run into a brick wall of reality. And the same will be true of needing to continue buying gas from Russia, just watch.

Europeans are funny because they naively get led around by the humanitarian and morality propaganda of US, while US continues to buy Russian and Saudi Oil, and just yesterday was meeting with Maduro in Venezuela (world's largest oil reserves) probably to make arrangements to bring his oil back online for US, and be their next Saudi Arabia. Rhetoric around his treatment of his people or Guaido being their guy was always nonsense, now they secure their resources while Europe economy withers. You "go green" while rest of world, China, Russia, US continue to consume cheaper and more productive oil, gas and nuclear, and increase relative economic and geopolitical power at your expense.

People should read up on Mackinder's heartland theory, and the geographic pivot [0]. US policy has always been to keep Europe down and Germany and Russia apart; if they were allies, US would lose a huge vassal they can lead around for their own geopolitical aims.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geographical_Pivot_of_Hist...

about 2% of US oil comes from Russia, so please don't act like we're a huge consumer of that. Everyone knows we buy Saudi Oil, and we have for decades, so no huge secret. Also keep "Europe down" is BS. Europeans are adults they can do wha they want. the heartland theory is garbage and many many historians and contemporary political scientists feel the same. Europe also buys Russian and Saudi Oil, probably in larger amounts than the USA so don't blame their ills on us. Again no one has forced them to ally with the USA.

But oil is fungible. This means you can’t really make statements such as we only buy 2% oil from Russia.

Scott Adams even made a strip for bad thinking like this:

Dilbert: I'm thinking about buying a more fuel-efficient car.

Dogbert: Why?

Dilbert: It's my patriotic duty to reduce this country's dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Dogbert: Why?

Dilbert: Because then the countries that hate us will have less money to fund terrorists.

Dogbert: Actually, developing countries would buy the oil you saved. Thus adequately funding those same terrorists.

Dilbert: At least I wouldn't be funding them myself.

Dogbert: Oil is a fungible commodity. The capitalist system virtually guarantees that you'll end up buying the lowest cost oil from sources unknown to you.

Dilbert: Well, maybe, but I want my car to make a statement.

Dogbert: And the statement would be "Hey, everyone, I don't understand what fungible means."

—————

Also you’re incorrect about US buying Saudi oil. Most of our oil did not come from Saudi Arabia.

Nothing about what you wrote is true.

Neither was the plan made by the CDU (it was only delayed by them) nor does the Green Party consider stopping the shutdown now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30578930

Well, then I'm relieved.

If it’s safe it should be done. Anything that can create pressure to end the war should be done.

One other thing is that while natural gas is “cleaner”, it’s clear that leaks in the natural gas infrastructure are putting way more methane into the air than previously realized. I’m not sure you can trust countries such as Russia to have strong policies in place to make sure wells are properly sealed.

Keeping the last 3 power plants online will not create any pressure, it just won't further increase Russia's already strong negotiation position.

I think you mean to say natural gas is cleaner than coal. It's obviously not cleaner than nuclear.

I would like to see Nuclear Power plants working up until we convert everything into renewables. Use the much needed energy to build renewable systems from the already existing Nuclear Power generation capacity.

Very unpopular opinion around here but I think the future is not Nuclear. Besides the unsolved problems of nuclear waste, It employs huge risks and it is safe the exactly the same way the airlines are safe: high quality operations. I simply don't trust that the excellence displayed by most of the current operators will be scaled to %100 of the operators and even a few disasters is way too many(again, very similar to airlines).

We also witnessed that NPPs can be targeted by military forces, just yesterday. This time nothing happened but it could have happened. You might have missle proof reactors but you still need the support personel to be alive and operational to keep the thing safe. Also, a warlord might decide that it is a good idea to sabotage a captured facility to achieve some strategic goal(after all, these are people who use destruction and murders as tools and they do threaten with nuclear warfare).

Article quotes rather old statements (from 27th of February). The minister had said they were considering/checking it, but AFAIK its overall consensus that it would not be possible. It is simply too late for that, the process has been going for too long. Jobs were laid of/relocated and new qualified jobs in that sector were not created due to the upcoming nuclear exit. And you will not find anybody wanting to go back to that field, given that it is perfectly clear that this is not future proof.

A large percentage of homes in Germany use gas for heating and Germany imports a lot of that gas.

Coupled with Germany being the biggest emitter of CO2 in Europe, nuclear looks like a way to kill two birds with one stone.

They should immediately bend some of their manufacturing assets toward the goal of electrification. We need all heating to be electrified in the next 20-50 years anyway. No time like the present to start working on this effort.

Does Germany mostly use forced air or boilers for heat? Forced air is easier to switch to electric heat pumps, AFAICT.

Nearly every Building uses Boilers for heating

Yes then we produce electricity with Russian gas :)

Where is the electricity going to come from? Especially if they are closing nuclear and coal-fired power plants. They are building some renewables, but prices for electricity were high this year because wind speeds were low.

Renewables and nuclear. That new sources of energy should be carbon free goes without saying. New coal is obviously a non-starter.

That being said, they are already well on their way with this process. Check out the decline in fossil fuel electric generation over the past half decade!

https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/DEU/electrici...

Do you have a spare nuclear power plant? Because Germany does not. The three still running have been run down over the last 10 years (as shut down was plannend long term), those will not be run any longer. If you want to kill two bird with one stone, you better have a stone. Without one, you are screwed.

I don't have a spare plant no.

So if nuclear is the answer, Germany will need to see what it takes to reverse a long term shut down or build new.

Or stop buying Russian energy and start buying French energy

I think that Sweden burns garbage to warm houses. Maybe exploring it could be useful.

Afaik, all European nations burn some of their garbage. Here is a list of German incinerators: https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/37.... I think, the heat is barely used for warming houses, but then, most people don't want to have an incinerator in their neighborhood.

The European power grid is very much already a thing and France exported 9.5 TWh of power to Germany last year (and imported 3.7TWh): https://energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=....

I think the cards a pretty much on the table at this point. What's left is various industry groups trying to get a bigger share of the to be invested money. Some think that the war won't last long enough for the next winter and as Russia 'has always delivered', it won't be an issue anyways. Also, there are still coal back-up plants. It wouldn't be nice but people will not die because of this.

Since it was a political decision to shut them down, it's hard for me as an outside observer to judge a statement that they've been "run down". Is there an independent assessment of the safety of the existing power plants, free from political influence?

Germany consumes the equivalent of 3300 PJ of natural gas per year, mostly for heating. This is an average heating power of 105 GW. Probably less than that in summer, and a lot more in winter. Considering how expensive nuclear power is, I don't see that kind of capacity being added anywhere in Europe. Renewables might have a better chance against fossil fuel in the near future.

JFC, The entire land area of Germany devoted to wind turbines would not produce that right now.

Germany heats with Russian gas, or nuclear, or does not.

No...Germany heats with Gas or coal. Electrical heating is negligible (not even 3%)[1] as was nuclear in it's current status. It's no no-topic at this point. You don't need it. It causes more problems to keep it running than continuing to shut it down.

Also...there is no scenario and never was to build ONLY wind turbines...there are many scenarios which consider ALL of the renewable sources and you don't even need "the entire land of Germany" for it...[2]

[1] https://www.bmwi-energiewende.de/EWD/Redaktion/Newsletter/20...

[2] https://www.erneuerbare-energien.de/EE/Navigation/DE/Service...

> A large percentage of homes in Germany use gas for heating and Germany imports a lot of that gas.

I'd wager that's the case of most european countries. It's certainly the case for france: in 2020 nat gas was 40% of heating, then wood at 30, electricity at 15 (including heat pumps), and then oil.

France consumes nearly as much energy in nat gas (in Wh) as it produces electricity, and that's with very little nat gas going towards electricity unlike some of its neighbours.

Except that you can't use nuclear for heating - not unless you exchange all gas heaters with electric heaters. Which we are trying to get rid off, as they are the most inefficient form of heating.

A heat pump is efficient.

With today's absurd gas prices, in Romania, even a resistive heater using hydropower costs less than a gas-powered heater.

If you use heat pumps, that goes even cheaper (by the CoP of the heat pump).

You can switch power or gas suppliers at any time.

Given a choice between efficiently burning carbon or inefficiently using a zero-carbon energy source, the inefficient solution seems far superior.

Electrical heaters' efficiency is literally 100%.

Do you mean the conversion into electrical energy is "the most inefficient"?

False, an electric heater is 100% efficient (it's a pure resistive load). But these days we can do better, and you would say that we can't to better than 100% efficiency, but indeed we can with heat pumps, that are 300% efficient or more. Because they use electricity to move heat from one place (the exterior) to another (the interior), and they can transport more heat than the one they consume in the process.

Also, you can use nuclear also for direct heating, without passing trough electricity: city near the power plant can use the waste heat from cooling the reactor as city heating, that is with pipes that bring hot water in the homes for heating the radiators or making domestic hot water. Of course that is doable only for a city very near to the reactor, since transporting the heat have losses. But it was common in old soviet cities to use that form of heating.

I see this incorrect fact a lot and I think people confuse energy density with energy efficiency.

Every joule of electricity will give you more joules of heat than will gas.

The issue is moving and storing around a joule of electricity is much harder than a joule of gas.

There are even some district heating systems using nuclear power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#District_heat...

No they don't.

This "News" is from 28th of February where a partial sentence of Habeck has been taken out of context by some media.

It has been declined since than several times over and there was never substance to this "news".

https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article237209973/Ato...

yea, the OP article is a few weeks old and very much out of context. HN doesn't care though.. bunch of tech bros discussing headlines.

Note: this does not necessarily mean new nuclear.

Keep the current nuclear going, build renewable sources of electricity, and retire fossil fuel plants first. Once those are gone continue with renewables building and then (perhaps) shutdown nuclear.

Building new nuclear would be a separate discussion from the above.

it does _not at all_ mean "new nuclear"..

that was never up for discussion and would certainly not help with the problem that the whole discussion is about: a potential short term energy shortage related to russias invasion of ukraine.

Nuclear power is the future, modern nuclear power is very safe and emissions free.

No more nuclear waste?

At least with nuclear you have some control over where the waste goes, as it is so highly concentrated.

Theoretically yes, in practice it has mostly been politics first when deciding where to put that stuff than anything else, at least in Germany.

Bury it deep. Either we survive as a species technologically, and will always know where it is, or we become cavemen again and lose the technology to dig down that deep. Win win.

Nuclear is the safest energy source.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-d...

Safer than solar, wind, and hydro?

If a damn fails, I imagine the result would be pretty devestating to anything downstream.

Yup. More deaths in this one dam failure in China than all worldwide nuclear deaths combined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

Big intensity, short duration.

Nuclear accidents will be devastating for thousands of years so very different things.

This is like saying that high voltage is harmless because high amperage can kill you also. Time to move on further in this discussion and stop talking about that damn. Is a popular stance but useless to compare both

Yeah. In solar and wind lots of deaths from falling off roofs or windmills.

This is as much true as it is trolling

> Nuclear is the safest energy source.

The cited link shows that deaths directly attributable to nuclear power thus far is the lowest based on the data used.

This is not the only definition of safety, and should not be portrayed as such.

The primary objections to fission nuclear power has been the many-thousand-year half-life of the waste products, not that it would kill people while being built or while running. We have no way to project what the tally will look like in 10k years time.

That is absolutely true.

However, we also risk an extinction event if we don't get carbon emissions under control, so turning a known 100 year risk into a several thousand years possible risk feels like a good bet.

I don't know of anyone suggesting that climate change is going to be an extinction event. Changing patterns of human settlement, and the state of human civilization? Certainly. Extinction? Doesn't seem likely right now, from everything I've read.

So you'd rather see -- worst case -- the CO2 concentration explode and biomes altered radically, than having some local hotspots of radiation?

It's certainly going to be, and is already, an extinction event for many other species. While it's true that humans probably won't go extinct as easily, billions of lives may be lost to collapsing ecosystems. We can't feed ourselves at large scale without an ecosystem to support us. At this point, that risk is looking much, much worse than the risk carried by nuclear waste in the long term.

>Changing patterns of human settlement.

That's an awfully cynical way of saying that billions of people will be displaced and die because of lack of food, floods, that migratory crises might lead to actual live weapons getting used for first countries to "defend themselves".

But sure, it's not an extinction event. Just billions of deaths over the next century and an upheaval of our society. No biggie.

I'm not trying to downplay the scale and scope of climate change. I just prefer to use accurate terminology. If it was going to or was likely going to lead to the extinction of humanity, I'd want people to say that. Instead, it seems likely to lead to billions of people dying and billions more being displaced and a total reorganization of most nation states/cultures worldwide, along with (as noted above) significant extinction for many other species.

I lived through the fear (and shared it) in the 1970s about a variety of world- and civilization-changing transformations, and while I believe that the talk of them then was largely well-intentioned, the sloppy language that was used then turned into linguistic weaponry to be used against those arguing for the much-more-likely-to-be-true climate change that we are now facing.

Fair enough. I should probably have phrased it differently.

Well if the alternative is keeping gas and coal online, we also have no idea what our planet will look like in 10k yrs if we callously keep dumping CO2 into the atmosphere

I am not for 1 moment suggesting that gas&coal should be the alternative.

I'm not even arguing against continuing to use nuclear fission. I just don't like descriptions of it like "the safest power generation method" that elide the complex nature of the word "safety".

Not going to happen fast enough, or cost less than renewables.

Only the future is now and we already live in it. Nuclear power is already the most superior source of energy.

Just keep the comrades away from it and we'll be safe and sound.

But its not cheap, given that nuclear waste disposal will take for so long and companies do not factor the true price of securing nuclear waste for thousands of years. We could see what happened in Germany after the nuclear exit was put into place: Energy companies tried to split up, moving their nuclear business into one company, and their renewables into another - a very apparent move to let the nuclear company (with all the burdens of waste disposal management) go bankrupt into a couple of decades, knowing that the government will take over the burden for free. The german government prevented this through a buy-out deal, where the companies would put a sum of roughly 50bn € into a fund, and the responsibility ownership would go over to the government once and for all.

The issue is, no one can put a real price tag on nuclear waste management that will take thousands of year. It's all some made up number that is used to show that nuclear energy is cheap. But it is not, we are just boworring money from the future. Even if you think from an engineering standpoint that we can secure nuclear waste for generations to come, I don't believe we have the economic system to achive that. Companies don't exist long enough to be responsible for thousand-year long commitments - only society does.

We don't need to store nuclear waste for thousands of years. We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel. After that, we'll need to store the fast reactor waste for 300 years.

Since the decline is exponential, most of the radioactivity will be gone from that waste after the first few decades. Melt it into glass blocks and bury it, and it'll likely be fine.

Several fast reactors are in commercial operation already, and various companies are working on new designs.

We've had fast reactors since the 70s. It is simply that they are even less economical than regular nuclear power plants, and those are already completely uncompetitive compared to renewables.

> Breeder reactors are costly to build and operate. About $100 billion (in 2007 dollars) has been spent worldwide on breeder reactor research and development and on demonstration breeder reactor projects. Yet none of these efforts has produced a reactor that is economically competitive with a conventional light water reactor. The capital costs per kilowatt of generating capacity of demonstration liquid sodium-cooled fast reactors have typically been more than twice those of water cooled reactors of comparable capacity. Although it could be expected that once in production this cost ratio would decline, today few, if any, experts argue that breeder reactor capital costs could be less than 25 percent higher than that of similarly sized water cooled reactors.4

> The breeder reactor dream is not dead, but it has receded far into the future. In the 1970s, breeder advocates were predicting that the world would have thousands of breeder reactors operating this decade. Today, they are predicting commercialization by approximately 2050. In the meantime, the world has to deal with the hundreds of tons of separated weapons-usable plutonium that are the legacy of the breeder dream and more being separated each year by Britain, France, India, Japan, and Russia.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.2968/066003007

> We need to store it until we have fast reactors that can use it for fuel

Which obligates us and generations after us, to keep using nuclear and develop those in the first place. So, please factor in those costs today into the price.

We have no idea what those costs will be. Given that for-profit companies are trying to develop new fast reactors, at least some people think it will actually be profitable.

However, I guess it's reasonable to include some such estimated cost in today's reactor prices, if we also:

1) Include the costs of climate change and/or ambient carbon removal in the cost of all fossil fuels, and

2) In wind/solar costs, include the cost of all the batteries, long-distance transmission, demand management, and overproduction that we'd need to keep the grid reliable without the fossil backup we're using today. Areas with sufficient hydro can skip this.

Since we already made nuclear wastes, it's sunk cost though it's still matter. Double it won't add cost very much.

You're right about it being very safe and emissions free. It would be a great choice if we wanted to solve CO2 emissions.

But the reporting around last week's attack on Zaporizhzhia illustrates why it's not the future. The "paper of record" reporting vague experts' fears about a "cloud of radioactive isotopes over Europe"[1]. The Ukrainian President saying: "If there's an explosion, it's the end of Europe"[2]

How can nuclear overcome that level of FUD? No idea what it would take, honestly.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/science/ukraine-nuclear-p...

[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/04/ukraine-nuclea...

> modern nuclear power is very safe and emissions free.

And then you have a war and the house of cards collapses in a week

At this moment nuclear is as reliable as Putin mind will be, (and many people would say that the man is acting in a totally insane way).

Nuclear will never will be more reliable than the less reliable of the people at charge of it, that are the weakest links in this chain. No matter how much technology, laws and wax seals you put on it. Still can be destroyed by the next idiot narcissist in power.

Ukraine has been sounding an alarm about battles happening next to its nuclear reactors. I would think it's very hard to make any nuclear safety guarantees if the power station gets hit with missiles.

War also makes people do crazy things, and it's very easy to imagine a reactor being sabotaged on purpose, even by defenders themselves (scorched earth tactics).

So on the whole it seems like we have another reminder that nuclear just cannot be made 100% safe.

In other articles German experts say that if Russia cuts of the gas, there will be economic Armageddon in Germany.

Yet Germany still strongly resists pausing the closure of currently running nuclear power plants.

What is going on here? This doesn't make any sense. Why such resistance to even pausing the process?

TFA gives this hint, but doesn't go into detail:

> Yet, the long-winded process of shutting down the country’s nuclear plants may have already progressed too far to be able to stop it, the operators of the plants have warned.

I'd also like to know.

I’d expect it’s mostly a financial and personnel issue.

People have been laid off, refueling operations haven’t been planned, multi billion dollar contracts for cleanup are set to start with the associated workers/staffing already underway.

In short, nothing that can’t be changed with an injection of capital and assistance from the French/international nuclear industry.

It is very simple. The shut down of those nuclear power plants has been planned to the day for about 10 years. That includes maintanance, how much fuel is needed, which people are going to keep their job, how many new people are hired and trained, who retires early. There is almost no chance to change that trajectory with only 10 months to go. And were not even talking about the regulatory planning that would be needed. The german nuclear power plants will be shut down on december 31 this year. Nothing, short of a nuclear war, is going to change that.

So Germany would rather inflict itself tens of billions of euros of economical damage, instead of figuring out how to stop a planned process?

Has it got that inflexible? That's a scary thought.

I really don't understand why everybody is making this out to be some kind of impossible goal for Germany to reverse course.

We are truly doomed as civilizations if we don't know how to adapt and change to current circumstances.

Well, we are also doomed if we only consider a single alternative and present it as the only possible solution. But that is happening in this very thread. So yeah, we are probably doomed :)

Where do you get "tens of billions of euros of economical damage" and "economic Armageddon in Germany" from? are you a russian troll bot?

Yes, I'm quoting the Bloomberg russian bot:

> Supply cut would rip through Germany’s industry within weeks

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-05/germany-f...

323 is just questioning why Germany doesn't reverse a seemingly obvious miscalculation. No need to assume a troll from that. And 10 billion euros are 125 € per German inhabitant, the pre-war price hike has caused multiple times that much 'damage'.

if you use excessive language ("economic armageddon") and figures ("10 billion euros") like this and don't provide sources, i assume trolling.

i see he posted the bloomberg article now. imo, reading "Supply cut would rip through Germany’s industry within weeks" and interpreting that as "if Russia cuts of the gas, there will be economic Armageddon in Germany" is pretty extreme, but i guess people interpret stuff differently.. that's fine, just let me form my own opinion about your statement by citing a source.

As far as I understand gas heating hasn’t been electrified so it’s difficult to replace it with renewables or nuclear quickly. Keeping the plants on might take some pressure off existing gas supplies though they’re very old and the process has been going on for years.

Many industrial processes need heat that is NOT generated with electricity.

Natural gas has many use in the energy sector but is also needed in the manufacturing sector (making glass for example?)

So wouldn't it be a good idea then to stop burning gas for generating electricity by using nuclear instead?

Yes. But you can't replace manufacturing processes that need gas with electricity lol

Germany import like 60/65% of the gas from Russia. Not all of that is used to generate electricity, I don't have the breakdown but I'm pretty sure that a big part goes to manufacturing

It's about equally split between electricity, heating and industry

The phasing out of nuclear power has been in progress for almost a quarter of a century by now, and it's a slow process that is almost complete and cannot realistically be rolled back at this point. Furthermore, nuclear energy has only ever been a very small part of energy supply in Germany. Lastly, electricity from nuclear power plants wouldn't even be useful for replacing gas that is needed by the industry or for heating purposes. In short, it's neither feasible, nor would it be useful.

Large nuclear power plants Brokdorf and Grohnde have been closed down end of last year. Could an engineer tell me the concrete measures to restart them, or why they can't be restarted to meet demand, or other implications of restarting them?

Renewable energy sources are not without hitches.

20% of wind mills in Sweden are owned by one foreign company.

Hint: That state-owned company was banned in the US for stealing nuclear technology for military use.

We should probably aim to have 50% over provisioned capacity for energy production at the national level, and chaos monkey it to ensure that it's resilient.

Could they maybe like reopen some?!

Not something you can just turn back on.

Well, I definitely did not expect it can be done over night. More like over a year or something.

At last

Buy from Russia, keep using nuclear, or suffer an energy crisis. There are no other real options for them to consider.

So... Germany decided, back in 2011, to completely shut down their nuclear power plants in 2021 & 2022. Now - after 10 years of the plant operators carefully planning for that (longer-term maintenance not done, suppliers for parts have discontinued production, key personnel retiring with no trained replacements, etc., etc.) - Germany suddenly wants to say "no, wait, keep 'em running!"

I thought Germany was the land of competent engineers and managers?

EDIT: Critics - yes, you're 90+% correct on facts, current German leaders are stuck playing the cards currently on the table, and I understand that Morton Thiokol engineers did not blow up the Challenger. But "suddenly wants to" != "decided". And my point was to mock Germany's political leadership for proving disastrously bad at what is a very traditional & stereotypical German strength.

Perhaps if German politicians were not allowed to take office without earning at least X% of the votes of practicing engineers. And demonstrating that they can pour beers without injuring themselves...

Engineers? Some, certainly. Managers? Maybe. Probably not. But politicians? Hardly.

Erm, have you noticed that the situation has changed?

No, Germany hasn't decided to keep them running. They are evaluating the implications if they wanted to keep them running. And as you said, it is unlikely, that this is a good idea because their lifetime was planned to end. As the article says, the most likely outcome is: we shut them down and rather concentrate all efforts to hasten the transition to renewables.

Germany decided this in the late 90s when Gerhard Schröder was in office, when Merkel came to power she tried to delay the closure but she was forced to revise that when Fukushima happened.

Doesn’t Gerhard Schröder have ties to the Russian gas industry?

Yes, infamously so.

Yes, he was heavily involved in the Nordstream pipelines and was/is a friend of Putin.

So a big part of the SPD is "pro Russia"

They even asked to remove sanctions: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/how-german-climate-f...

He didn't back then, and he wasn't the driving force behind the decision either, the Greens were. Stop trying to spin this into some sort of conspiracy.

It was an honest question. I lived/studied in Germany back when he was chancellor, but I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of German politics.

The anti-nuclear movement so clearly benefits Russian energy exports it's laughable. The definition of "useful idiot".

Sure, in the years after Chernobyl it is expected there would be a genuine fear. But now we understand what went wrong and how to design safe reactors it is not a logical position.

> I thought Germany was the land of competent engineers and managers?

They do not make the decisions, the politicians and the authorities do.

The engineers/managers are the one that are likely screaming to them saying nuclear energy is safer, more productive and cost effective vs. buying Russian gas via Nordstorm pipelines.

The Ukraine situation has just made the politicians wake up and reconsidering the energy supply in the country. Definitely not a good idea to have a big chunk of the country dependent on another country that is hostile.

At this point, it is best to keep nuclear plants running as a base energy supply which switching to renewables at faster pace to replace it.

>I thought Germany was the land of competent engineers and managers?

I've heard that this is a myth; rather, Germans are very good at following rules.

Brandenburg Airport is evidence that German engineering/management is overrated.

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