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Comment by 323 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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