Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com
If this was written by an expert, that could make some sense, but it is not. Nuclear plant is not a startup, where you can just skip the QA part to release faster or put a not working cookie banner for few months, because nobody really checks compliance. You have to conduct safety tests, there should be enough staff and replacement parts, fuel supply must be secured, waste disposal must be planned in advance. Calling to accept risks of not doing this properly is not exactly what German public supports. The polls are tricky thing to do. If you ask certain questions you will get whatever results you want. I’m sure it was not explained to the public in the poll that they will have to accept higher risks of nuclear disaster if reactors will be allowed to operate. Everyone thinks that it is as safe as it was in the past - no wonder majority would support it to help Ukraine.
The thing is, this majority also includes supporters of Greens and the party itself is not the same as it was in 80s. Greens are no longer unconditional pacifists and anti-nuclear hippies. They are the biggest supporters of sending heavy weapons to Ukraine now. They would extend nuclear if possible, because it advances the more important agenda of reducing emissions and helps Ukraine. They were ready to wait 20 years to phase out nuclear in 2000s, and it wasn’t Greens who accelerated shutdown after Fukushima. It was pro-business CDU with Merkel as a head of the government. This is why I would rather trust Habeck with his report than some random guy from the Internet with a political message.
- The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert.
- They quantify the additional risk of meltdown due to delaying new safety regulations. It's negligible compared to operating plants according to the new regulations.
- Their proposal would increase Germany's stockpile of nuclear waste by 3%, which is surely within engineering tolerances, ignoring the fact that the disposal facilities were planned before they decided to prematurely close the plants.
I don't see how it matters which political party made which political decisions in the past. Conditions have changed.
That's not how it works. Just going to grad school (and it appears this is just for a Master's) doesn't imply you're suddenly an expert on an entire discipline. Even full professors don't generally claim to be experts in their entire fields; they become experts in their niches sub-fields/areas of research. You'd need to know what topics someone has actually studied, what their work/research was like, etc. before you can assume they're an expert in the areas you care about, and that information isn't given here.
To me it sounds a bit like when anti vaxxers dismiss doctors who aren't epidemiologists, or when people dismiss Krugman because he's a trade economist and not some other subspecialty.
Just give the guy credit for his claim that he's studied this, chances are he's closer to the area than people who don't claim expertise and otherwise let him present his case, which is what really matters anyway.
I would think my reasonableness would stop me in that case, but there's not much I can offer you when you've already assumed otherwise.
And to be extremely clear: I was merely responding to the metric/reasoning used in the parent comment, not making any claims about the author's qualifications in particular. It would've applied to anybody, whether Einstein or just a random dude. Even for Einstein, you don't say "I know Einstein was an expert because he went to grad school", you say (for example) "I know Einstein was an expert in mechanics because he came up with relativity, an expert in electromagnetism because he explained the photoelectric effect, etc." That was my point, is all.
> I studied nuclear energy generation in my two MSc in Industrial Engineering.
which to me sounds not like he actually did a masters in nuclear power generation, but took some courses during his masters. But even if he did, that doesn't make him an expert, whom of the software developers here would let a grad student come to their company and say "I did a masters in CS I will tell all of you how to do your dev work"?
So yes this sounds exactly like the anti vaxxers, who say they studied some bioscience (or are even some doctors) and can somehow dismiss World renowned experts.
Isn't this... how you hire people?
I think it makes you pretty knowledgeable. Expert is a bit vague. Many would consider expertise in having extensive knowledge beyond that of the public. If he studied in undergrad he'd have this. He'd get more in grad school. But if we're talking expert as in "leading expert" then no, he clearly isn't that. But by your own definition, it means that the politicians that made these evaluations and decisions themselves were not experts. If a full professor does not qualify then even a PhD in nuclear physics but working in politics certainty does not qualify.
So I'm a bit confused by this comment. I appreciate an appeal to experts as opposed to assuming that we here on HN know better, but I feel this comment moved the goal post too far and just shifted the decision to experts in an inconsistent manner.
Also, the piece is at such a high level that it really doesn't take a lot of expertise to write. The summary of the article is "I'd rather take the risks of nuclear by restarting our existing nuclear infrastructure rather than to continue to fund the Russian war machine." That's really it. He gives more support and tries to sound scientific, but it's just an opinion and the guy is an actual expert in marketing. Seems fair enough.
And we have not solved the storage at all in Germany, there is no plan yet on where to put long-term storage for nuclear waste. This is certainly a solvable problem, but the fact that it has not been solved until now does not inspire confidence.
Burying it deep down in the earth is far safer. Sure, someone might eventually dig it up someday, but that'd be limited exposure in a confined area.
(Granted, the contents were not highly dangerous, but they would have been adequate for nuclear waste storage until at least now.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Mind you, in comparison the waste of gas is CO2, which is creating an existential crisis. (There's also other wastes like lead and heavy metals, from anything electronic, that need to be stored _forever_. Lead and heavy metals don't decay. They are dangerous forever.)
[0] https://nda.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/03/how-much-radioactive-wast...
People don't remember the Hanau scandal of the 80s/90s.
It was the 'Atomic village' of Germany, home to the two largest nuclear companies of Germany (one was, funnily, called Nukem). Their managers were accused of taking bribes, selling radioactive waste for weapons, and mislabeling atomic waste for cheaper disposal (including just chucking it into the sea!). It's one of the reasons why the early Green party was so anti-nuclear, there was no trust.
Atomic waste can be securely stored, but there will always be corners to be cut to make a quick buck.
There's a German language summary here: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/hanau-der-anfang-vom-en...
"Secure and easily monitored" doesn't account for: Natural disasters, human error or human depravity (sabotage, shooting, terrorism etc). And what if the government breaks down for some reason? If for any reason the "securely and safely monitoring" gets neglected...
So no, "a few tons of nuclear waste" really doesn't capture the problem...
Also, it will take a while for Russia to build enough natural gas pipelines to China.
In practice, those pipelines will be Putin's leash. (He will need China, but they have no need for him.)
I hope Ukraine maintains its independence, but it's just the first battle in a war Putin accidentally created, and will surely lose.
Putin did NOT accidentally create this war. It's clear that this was intentional and that there are real people suffering because of that intention. He tried opening more doors to see what benefits he could gain. That isn't an accident.
It probably won't escalate to a shooting war outside of Ukraine, but that's mostly because the rest of the world will probably be able to stop him via a proxy war.
He showed spectacular lack of judgment. I'm sorry if anyone thought I meant he lacks responsibility for his actions. I hope Putin is charged and convicted of war crimes.
There is a kind of an economic world war brewing right now, but I expected China to be on the receiving end from the start...
Germany is currently removing the dependency on russian gas. There is a consensus on this within Germany. The discussion on this topic revolves entirely around the question of how quickly to do this.
If this is or sure a multi decade conflict, what does it matter if this takes 1-2y instead of 1-2 weeks?
Gas and electricity are not entirely fungible, but Germany uses enough natural gas to produce electricity to cover the reduced imports.
It’s suicidal for the EU to give up gas short or mid term.
It’s possible to produce the required hydrogen using electricity and electrolysis, but not at a moments notice. You can’t just easily replace gas in electricity production by using nuclear- gas power plants are used for peak load, nuclear power plants for base load.
Although if greens in Germany were actually committed to reducing energy use they would have subsidized converting buildings from gas heat to using heat pumps instead of subsidizing solar production in Germany.
Heat pumps are subsidized in germany.
And if you want to blame the greens - they’ve been the most vocal party asking for energy independence, subsidizing energy efficient technologies and were very vocal against nord-stream 2. It’s just that they weren’t in power at all in the last decade.
The general thrust of your argument seems to be “nuclear power will not help shed Russian gas even a little bit” which seems ludicrous.
There are other niches where gas is used to produce electricity, for example we have a gas micro power plant that produces both electricity and heat for the apartment complexes on the local compound. This too, cannot be replaced by a nuclear plant.
Nuclear weapons is another topic, but those won't be affected by short term sanctions in the slightest...
But what happened in Fukushima or Tschernobyl is bad enough. The damage caused by the Fukushima incident might well run into the trillion US Dollar range. No, it's not cleaned up yet, they still don't really know what to do with all the soil and how to demolish the plant. You really don't want anything like that happening in your country, even at the low probabilities the nuclear lobby claims.
First of all, that estimate was not made by an expert, as other commenters pointed out. Second, the additional risk is created not because of new safety standards, but also from all other factors where deviation from standard procedures could accelerate the process. This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely populated country as Germany trillions. The choice between „you may loose everything but Russia will suffer next year“ and „let’s try something else to actually stop the war“ has pretty obvious outcome.
You know everyone who died from Fukushima died from the evacuation not radiation, right? You know more people are killed in Germany every year from coal pollution than have died as a result of Chernobyl in total?
Many local areas were reporting over radiation of >500 millisieverts/year, which is ~150x the typical background dose. The famous XKCD Radiation chart shows a bunch of Fukushima related doses -- it was actually pretty dangerous for people close to the exclusion zone!
> no one died of radiation, since they were evacuated. The people who did die, because of the evacuation, shouldn’t count because they didn’t die from the radiation. The evacuation wasn’t necessary, which is proven since no one died from radiation.
And the notion that more people would have died from the radiation if they didn’t evacuate is just ignored. Well, no one died in the fire. The only people that died did because they jumped from windows. But that no one died in the fire proves that the fire wasn’t dangerous and they didn’t need to jump in the first place.
I don't want to trivialise that - it is a big cost. But it isn't exactly like we're talking a threat to anyone's health and well-being. And when I say "rare" I mean once, globally, every 25 years with 1970s plant designs. It is quite a bit safer now with the absurd safety standards people make nuclear keep.
Basically, although costly, it is a tiny risk once we estimate [danger x likelihood = risk].
For example, nobody considered that Russia would fire artillery against nuclear reactors. And now a threat of attacks with powerful conventional weapons against nuclear reactors and waste processing/storage has to be considered very seriously.
Similarly we cannot assume that technological progress would not allow a single terrorist with right equipment to trigger another Chernobyl.
I think in that sentence, the scary part is not the nuclear reactor part. And my understanding is nuclear plant design includes consideration of missile impacts.
I wasn't aware that the nuclear accident caused massive flooding (the person you're responding to is saying that everyone died from the tsunami, not the radiation). Your point still stands about large economic costs to exclusion zones, but I don't feel you responded in good faith. As per the article (and as someone who actually did study nuclear physics), the risk of creating an exclusion zone in Germany is extremely small. Last I checked German doesn't have many earthquakes nor large bodies of water that could lead to danger from tsunamis. Germany seems fairly stable from an environmental standpoint, so the only real causes for a nuclear disaster would be from a freak accident. Considering we've learned a lot about safety in the last decade (and way more since Chernobyl), this risk is pretty small.
If a power station was shelled in Germany what measures would avoid an exclusion zone?
And to be clear, there are plenty of groups that would deliberately cause an issue exclusion zone.
A reactor rupture causes widespread contamination even with modern reactors. There is nothing at all in modern designs that stops that.
Large evacuations are rare but they aren't that uncommon. It just doesn't get the news attention. It is a bit like traffic deaths, which might also be a significant portion of the deaths caused by the evacuation. Force 180,000 to take to the road and some will not return back alive.
Living downstream of a hydro power dam is actually more dangerous than living near a nuclear plant. The destructive forces of a dam is barely being maintained by a thin layer of concrete, and it only takes a bit of human mistakes and bad weather to cause mayhem and death.
It sad that your Russian grandfather died because the government was dishonest and didn't protect their citizens. I know similar stories from mining towns where especially radon tend to be of such high levels that people end up getting cancer and die. Most nations have regulations to prevent that but it took many lives before those regulations where in place. Fossil fuels are particular guilty in creating large uninhabitable areas because of increase radiation risks, but basically any mining has been guilty. Cut into the ground and significant amount of radioactive material will end up in the air and water.
This conversation is happening in response to my mentioning of Fukushima (see the thread above). I did not focus exclusively on the loss of life and do not see why the discussion should be restricted to that topic.
Nevertheless, "uninhabitable" means people cannot live there so it's still within your frame. You cannot live in the area with significant radioactivity without risking your life. Loss of life can be prevented by quickly moving people from the dangerous area, but this is also undesirable. This is not comparable to environmental effects related to construction of dams or mining activities, because those can be estimated in advance and mitigations including resettling can be planned. This is also the reason why new mining projects in Germany are rarely happening and there's ongoing process to stop mining coal. If you want to account for possible radioactive fallout from a nuclear plant incident and plan mitigations in advance, there's simply no place in Germany where you could put a circle with 30-50 km radius and just remove all people from there. Practically all land in Germany is covered by urban areas, agricultural lands or natural reserves - increased risks associated with extension of timeline for existing reactors without major and time-consuming investment are unacceptable there.
Quickly moving people from the dangerous area is undesirable, but as I said previously, California did exactly that. It would be interesting to see an estimate on how many died from it so we could make an apple to apple comparison.
When looking at energy sources it is good to look at statistics. Per unit of energy produced, how much land is used. How many lives are lost. How many are maimed or injured.
If we are jumping directly to unacceptable risks, continuing funding Russian military is unacceptable risk to Germany. Continuing burning fossil fuel and causing global warming is unacceptable. Not having enough enough electricity produced to meet demand is unacceptable. Paying more for electricity than the economy can handle is unacceptable. Continuing having nuclear power plants is unacceptable. Solving the unacceptable problems seems to be impossible, and thus some things that are unacceptable will need to be accepted. The question is which one people are willing to stomach. Personally I kind of dislike the idea of funding civilian slaughter and Russian quest for lebensraum.
Germany stopping buying gas now will neither stop the war, nor it will prevent Russian military from receiving money from Russian government. Everyone who repeats this idea as you do is just diverting the discussion from other options.
Yes, you may feel some moral obligation to cut off economic ties to Russia, but there are always stupid moral choices (doing more harm than good) and reasonable ones. Continuing with nuclear, stopping gas imports are both stupid choices. Locking cash paid for gas on an escrow account in neutral country could work better. Accelerating investment in renewables and energy conservation, cutting red tape, shipping heavy weapons and offering other support to Ukraine are more pragmatic and impactful options.
We can call names if we want. Continuing heating the planet up by burning fossil fuels when we have a cleaner option is stupid and history won't look favorable to fossil fuel advocates. There is a mass extinction occurring all over the world, especially in the oceans, just because people are afraid of a once in 100,000 year risk that with modern technology is even smaller risk. There has never been a earthquake recorded in Germany that has been large enough to interfere with German nuclear plants. Utterly madness how afraid people are to something which won't occur.
Conflict resources are internationally known to be a factor in war, in contributing to war, and to prolong wars. It doesn't matter if the aggressor is an IS, some warlord in Congo, or Russia. A major tactic dealing with IS was to cut their funding, and while it did take many years, the effect of cutting IS funding is rarely disputed.
What you are doing here is a perversion of facts and opinions. Nobody is afraid of a nuclear incident caused by an earthquake in Germany. Nobody in this thread was talking about it. The examples of Fukushima or Chernobyl were provided only as examples of unforeseen events, that illustrate why safety must be taken seriously, why any „acceleration“ is dangerous and why actual risks and costs can be higher than some people wish to see.
>The risk that continuing buying gas from Russia will cause more war and further destruction is higher than the risk that continuing operations of nuclear power will cause a nuclear accident.
Europe will stop buying gas from Russia relatively soon to ensure it has less resources to wage new wars. It is absolutely baseless claim to say that immediate stop will have a significant positive impact.
Please provide your facts that providing Russia with more funds won't prolong and extend their war in Europe.
We can call your assertion a perversion of facts and opinions if you like. It is absolutely fact-less to say that immediate stop will not have a significant positive impact. An opinion one might say.
It is a fact that nation do see the purchase of conflict resources as an contributing factor for prolonging wars. Europe might stop buying fossil fuels from Russia in 5-10-20 years from now. It is also a Fact that we don't know if it will be too late, what Russia will do in the mean time, nor how they will react to more sanctions. The risk is that Russia will invade more countries if funding continue is only something which people can estimate, like the risk that a nuclear accident might occur within that time frame.
Please provide your crystal ball for inspection.
Would I expect a German plant to be run in a safer manner in the 2020s than a Soviet Ukrainian plant in the 1980s? Sure, absolutely. Both because of the design of the plants, and because of the different safety cultures. But I don't think we can just hand-wave a disaster away and claim that it only happened because of X or Y or Z, without being certain X, Y, and Z have been eliminated. And I don't think we can say that with certainty.
Also, if we're going to assume, that everything we build will be foundation for the next Hitler, then there's hardly point in doing anything.
And Nazi Germany had exactly the same issues you identified in Soviet Union: a reluctance to tell authority bad news.
But you can see that the scale of fuckups for these two is nowhere near of each other. Modern evidence is Ukrainian war, which Russians believed, can win in 48 hours.
My point is that authoritarian regimes are possible anywhere; they lead to information being surpressed; and this could be dangerous in the case of nuclear reactors.
The example of Russia seems an excellent example of the same pattern.
My point is, that chance of USSR-like regime in western Europe are pretty low, and being afraid to do anything, because it might be used by this hypothetical regime will probably cause more harm than good.
For eg. right now we're feeding Russia with money, which is guaranteed to be bad for us in the long run. I assume we are doing that, because it will be easier to find single scapegoat for nuclear plant failure, than for years of bad foreign politics.
Why? Surely if Brexit or Berlusconi or Le Pen or Orban or Erdogan shows us anything it shows how democratic outcomes are unpredictable, especially over the 50 year plus timeframe of a Nuclear Plant.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML2204/ML22040A111.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/flynn-backed-plan-...
I know that politicians suck, but if we do everything assuming that next Stalin and Lenin are inevitable, then even knfie production starts to look suspicious.
And that's why scientists (and politicians listening to them) have consistently underestimated the risks. Scientists somehow think it is not their job to account for Human error, fallibility or even depravity (see Russians attacking nuclear plants in Ukraine).
With nuclear plants we first of all do not acknowledge any vulnerabilities and if we do find one we do absolutely nothing because upgrading safety costs billions or requires building a new power plant which costs 10s of billions. Running nuclear power plants in unsafe conditions is an everyday business affair.
None died in Fukushima.
As far as people's lives are concerned, the death toll of the war in Ukraine is already two orders of magnitude higher.
Economic costs are incomparable too.
Liquidators (not exterminators) were well over 100,000 and while I was too young in 1986 to participate in liquidation efforts, I knew a few personally later on. They got their share of health problems from poor logistics on the ground. Like sleeping for months in tents at sub-zero temperatures. But not from radiation exposure.
It's a very small risk with a huge downside. The fact that scientists have consistently underestimated the likelihood of these events - even though so far there has never been one caused by ill intent - is not reassuring.
Also, how is it underestimated? There was an exceptionally huge tsunami there, and even with that there would have been no trouble given the backup-generators would work well and even then, only a slight radiation exposure happened. There have been orders of magnitude more failures in other power plants causing much bigger damage (not even counting the environmental effect of them!).
A particular problem are millions of square meters of radio-active top-soil and where to store it. Yes, those problems have not been solved yet, and most evacuees have not yet returned and will probably never return. No amount of propaganda will convince them that the site is safe after the "safe" reactor blew up and contaminated everything. Meanwhile nuclear power has become really unpopular in Japan. People like you will dismiss this as irrational fear. Or is it irrational that you think that the future risk is a) actually quantifiable and b) tolerable? Because neither of these is scientific consensus.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...
The USSR, and successor states, lost track of the liquidators, completely. It helped in not paying them. The West was fine with it, it made it easier to sell nuclear as save. It also meant that any Liquidator who died of conplications after Chernobyl was most likely not included in official figures, because nobody officially counted him as having been there in the first place.
Studying something in grad school likely makes you familiar, not an expert. I would be skeptical of anyone without at least a decade of industry experience. No one becomes an expert by going to grad school; you have to build real things under real constraints. I went through a selective hard sciences program (coincidentally including nuclear chemistry) and industry people forgot more than we ever learned.
School creates confident sounding opinions but it rarely creates deep domain expertise. I would put more value in the opinions of people that have built or worked on real systems.
And to be clear, I am broadly pro-nuclear. I think it is a critical part of the energy mix that has been maligned on anti-scientific grounds by parties with an agenda separate from providing clean, inexpensive energy.
Yes, things like that and "Oh, from now on nothing will happen, science says so!"scares the shit out of people. Anti-scientific? There is just no public support for storing the waste anywhere near where people live. And there isn't a safe site in Germany anyway.
Safe nuclear reactors may be decades away from broad commercialization.
And there is no clear, scientific reasoning that nuclear power is safer than the best mix of alternatives. First of all, any calculation to that regard is horrendously complicated on the nuclear side. Second of all, it always depends on the likelihoods observed in the past. There better be nobody sabotaging a nuclear plant, or stealing waste material for a dirty bomb and so on. Because that's impossible to calculate, so it is entirely reasonable to err on the side of caution.
That there is another level to the discussion, the fear of nuclear disasters is another topic. It is impossible to say where the "rational" level of fear is. Scientists have been wrong about the risks too often. With the huge downsides, people will gladly err on the side of caution.
My arguments are examples why the "anti-scientific" argument is just BS. The fear is not always rational, but always legitimate. It is all about risk tolerance.
The original article also treats all sources of electricity as interchangable. Some kind of plants are slow to turn on and up (e.g. nuclear plants) whereas others are very fast to turn on, off, up, or down (e.g. natural gas plants). The latter kind of plants is needed to compensate the unpredictability of solar and wind energy. Nuclear plants cannot fulfill that role.
In my opinion Germany should have started to invest way more in the last two decades in synthetization of natural gas from thin air and cheap solar and wind energy. That would provide us with huge storage facilities for energy. And we could make huge amounts of natural gas heating unit eco-friendly without having to replace them. And even ten or fifteen years back it was clear that not being dependend on Russia would be a good thing.
+100. It took me a while to internalise Nassim Taleb's point of skin in the game. Now that I exactly know what he means I've learned to more or less disregard opinions of non-practitioners.
The crux of the argument is simple enough. One should attach more weightage to opinions of who have stake in what they talking about. For instance, an a bond trader will have more realistic picture of economy than someone like Paul Krugman. Bond trader earns his wages by being more correct about economy. Paul Krugman on the other hand can change his opinion at the drop of a hat with zero negative impact to his earnings.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36064445-skin-in-the-gam...
Is it enough to be an expert in the underlying physics? Should you be an engineer with experience in any one of the dozens of disciplines? Do you need to be familiar with the specific design of a reactor (that is probably confidential)? Everyone is an expert but no one has a holistic view of everything. It's complicated!
No, the author doesn't seem to be an expert. Also for his claims you don't need a nuclear engineering background, you need economics.
If the political party doesn't matter, the author shouldn't have made false accusations against the Green party and used those as "support" for his argument.
That is not true, there are zero long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste in Germany. We only have short term and midterm storage facilities. That is the root problem. Nuclear power plants were build and operated without a plan how to dispose of the waste.
Only cadmium based thin film solar panels are problematic.
The burning of nuclear fuel is actually very closely managed, fuel elements are regularly shuffled around because the ones in the center burn up faster than the ones at the edge of the core and the shuffling around is planned a long time in advance. So, when the end of life is planned for 2022 then the plan is actually to have the fuel spent at that date and you couldn't get much additional power out of it.
The same is of course true for spare parts. First of all, the industrial environment that supplies spare parts knows since 20 years about the plans to phase out nuclear and plan accordingly. They are actively trying to run out of spare parts right now, while of course all the maintenance task that get a rating of "should be ok for some time" get skipped in the power plants. That means, that they would need major maintenance right now, while the spare parts are planned to be not there and the industrial capacity to build spare parts has been re purposed or dismantled.
The same of course also for personal, they knew for a long time this was coming and planned their careers accordingly, though this is probably the least problem of the tree, but still that lets me doubt wether the author ever did plan a moderately complex project, let alone being an expert about nuclear power.
I think it’s unreasonable to classify someone as an expert because they took a few courses in the curriculum for a related discipline.
You can forget those Civey online surveys. They're useless and the local nuclar fan club has been training their followers on when and where to vote.
In Germany not even the operators what nuclear back because renewables are the way now: https://www.ft.com/content/9a3228bd-6927-4d46-aa20-4c693811e...
The question currently is not gas vs nuclear at the moment. Building new reactors does not make any sense, given the current risk/cost/value IMHO: https://www.worldnuclearreport.org/
Running the remaining reactors that account for a fraction of Germany's energy production longer probably does not solve much. Particularly heating in Germany cannot be switched easily to gas. For power gas particularly addresses peak energy production from what I know. If you do not want to build back renewables that are fluctuating there is a need for gas currently. As it is about coal vs nuclear it is a bit of a different story.
Here we might come to the part were we might see politics failing in Germany, but this is very much because coal mining is a very central element to Germans culture. Government really only represents it's citizens. I think this is a good thing. I do not want to live in another country regardless of the political party currently ruling.
Looking at countries >80M citizens where are the more trustworthy governments???
My impression is that this is a typical German reply to criticism, yes there are worse cases, but it's not helpful to find a worse comparison if you want to grow.
From my outsider view and having lived in a bunch of places, I don't have the impression that the German government is doing a good service to their citizens (and definitely not to expats in high earning jobs). The policy around nuclear power and coal is making Europe as a whole less stable and prosperous (again, my view).
Anyhow, not going to argue with a German, best decision I've made was to leave, worst was to move there in the first place.
What Switzerland does is not scaleable. Small countries tend to deviate from the average. Some win, some lose.
The situation Germany finds itself in today is the direct result of these companies lobbying the various Merkel governments between 2005 and 2021. Instead of relying heavily on renewables, too much emphasis was placed on coal and gas when nuclear power was phased out. These companies were able to continue operating their old coal-fired power plants for a very long time, despite strong opposition, especially from the Green party.
Of all the parties represented in parliament, it was the Greens that was most critical about this policy in the last two decades. It was the Greens who, from the very beginning of his presidency, repeatedly and most strongly spoke out against Putin, his criminal warfare and suppression of human rights. It was the Greens who criticised North Stream 2 the most. It is the Greens, whose supporters today are most strongly in favour of a ban on imports of Russian gas and oil[1], and most strongly advocate the supply of heavy weapons to Ukraine.[2]
Guess whose judgement I trust the most, both with regard to the war in Ukraine and for a future energy policy.
[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/bilder/crchart-7833~_v-...
[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/bilder/crchart-7837~_v-...
What power source do you recommend they use to level off supply when solar/wind aren't producing?
About 5% of electricity need can be provided by Norway through pumped storage (Norway has a storage capacity of about 100TWh, but the grid is limited).
Much more storage will be needed in the future, but many storage projects have been delayed since the demand for them is not there yet.
Rarely 50% of the available coal production capacity is used. There will be spare capacity available for the near future even if a lot more coal plants are shut down.
No, they're just anti-nuclear hippies.
I am unsure how you came to that conclusion. A cost–benefit analysis need to include the benefit aspect, as otherwise it is by definition not a cost–benefit analysis.
> Everyone thinks that it is as safe as it was in the past
The article explicitly states that the security is just as safe as it was in the past. That is the issue that the German government analysis brings up. The German government has regulations that require plants to be more safe than it was in the past. It need to increase from one accident in 100,000 years, to less than one accident in 100,000 years. The German government analysis do not explain why this is more important than the benefits.
In other words, the only thing that needs to happen is the German green party to admit a mistake in fighting nuclear power harder than fossile fuels...
https://energytransition.org/2013/06/german-nuclear-plants-f...
Restarting nuclear isn't a bad idea, but it needs to be approached systematically and cautiously such that the risks from natural disasters and economic impacts are minimized, while also weighing the risks of continuing to support Russia.
Unfortunately, many plants across the world have not had accurate risk assessments done, both for natural disasters and economic risks.
smells like $$$ and more delays. nuclear is already by far the safest method of power production, and emits far fewer radionuclides than coal, and those numbers are the old generation more dangerous pressurized water reactors.
water's lapping at our feet
Nuclear is less safe than grid solar, it slightly beats rooftop solar because standing on roofs is dangerous and most solar installs are new.
Hydroelectric vs nuclear is tricky because large dams save lives and by reducing flooding etc, and installing hydroelectric when building a dam is much safer than building the dam in the first place. Which makes calculating the deaths from hydroelectric power tricky. Low head dams on the other hand are dangerous, but are largely abandoned technology.
Yeah and making the solar panel, how green is that?
I would like to add that they should bring in bouncy castles around homes when installing solar panels, the kids can play on them and primarily will definitely save the installer from falling. You could also package them together, like "Daddy daddy let's install solar panels" and kids could play in different places in the neighborhood that installed them one after another.
And then you get a better image for the kids, plus you get to lower down the "people falling off roofs" statistic and make solar panel look even better.
Depending from where you buy them, quiet green. Produced with 100% renewables, made in Germany with polysilicon made in Europe.
Why do you seem some emotional as if your identity is at stake here?
Not trying to defend the parent comment going off about bouncy castle, but I have a hard time believing that statement is true. This is the share of photovoltaic pannel production per region.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/668749/regional-distribu...
They also their own line of solar roof tiles in the pipeline.
I'm joking of course.
There are sometimes calculations where nuclear comes out on top of renewables. But these calculations are hugely more complicated for the nuclear side, and require nothing going wrong, or at least not much more than in the past, which is a dangerous assumption in my opinion. And with nuclear you lock yourself in.
A country needs to build up a large nuclear industry to make it profitable (or pay extra for imports), and to decommission plants or stop building them ahead of schedule increases the costs.
there are a lot of reasons why dramatic expansion (of the kind needed to take the edge off climate change) of hydro power isn't feasible. for one most of the suitable sites are already used. and the environmental impact is substantial
The chart often used by pro nuclear sources comes from 2012, compares things to rooftop solar, etc. But more recent data is down as wind and solar deaths are extremely front loaded during construction.
PS: As to batteries etc. The fact nuclear power plants have hundreds of people drive to them every day is going to have associated traffic accidents over the lifetime of a power plant. Where you draw lines as associated deaths or not is somewhat subjective.
There are many options. Specifically, Germany can...
1) Continue with BAU, which is Germany paying the costs of closing the reactors and relying on Russian gas.
2) Restart them as quickly as possible. This would minimize the costs of relying on Russia for gas, but would increase the risks of reactor problems from natural disasters.
3) Harden them for natural disasters while restarting them as quickly as possible, which costs more.
4) Use the money spent to harden them on other sources of generation/storage/load shifting/etc, which I suspect costs more.
5) Some of the above based on the specifics in each case.
In addition, Germany would still be reliant on Russian gas for other industrial uses even if nuclear/renewables/coal/storage/etc were able to completely replace gas in the grid.
Bet it someone with oil money. SA or Ruskies
Also, this is a war, and the nuclear plants have already been built. (and we only have a year or so left on the climate change clock anyway).
The lithium constraint will be solved by using sodium or iron batteries, depending on application.
> Most countries already have the infrastructure for strategic gas reserves. Some do. Some that you might think would, do not, UK for instance.
"The Rough storage facility in the North Sea, owned by British Gas owner Centrica, provided 70% of the UK gas storage capacity for more than 30 years before it shut in 2017 following a government decision not to subsidise the costly maintenance. ... The UK’s stores hold enough gas to meet the demand of four to five winter days, or just 1% of Europe’s total available storage. The Netherlands has capacity more than nine times the UK’s, while Germany’s is 16 times the size."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...
You would use batteries for example in a local small scale power plant, powering a small city district or a hospital or similar.
Most of the "concerns" people have are the result of propaganda and lobbying by the American Petroleum Institute. Most of the original flower power anti-nuclear groups were funded by oil.
Where does that come from? I'm pretty sure I wasn't funded by anyone when I protested against the building of the Torness station on a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).
Suddenly he became staunchly anti-nuclear and tried to create enough chaos to destroy the club. After failing to do so, he left to start a competing organization called Friends of the Earth that was anti-nuclear first environmentalism second. They went on to fund and facilitate protests and anti-nuclear action around the world.
It was later discovered he received half a million dollars (about $7m today) from the CEO of ARCO around the time all the trouble started.
The only problem is, that makes them non-renewable.
Renewables + gas = not renewable.
Renewables + batteries = not renewable (plus there's the whole child slavery thing that ideologues ignore)
(a) you realistically need seasonal storage for when the wind/sun are both weak, so about 30 * 24 Wh/W, and
(b) you need around 2× the otherwise needed generation capacity to charge those batteries.
Solar, wind, water, geothermal, biogas and battery storage together are more then enough to "keep the lights on" at all times. And in peaks we can already produce more renewable energy than we can use. It is "just" a matter of investing into storage and flexible consumption.
There is no way to run a modern economy with intermittent energy supply.
Non-Germans might be shocked to find that most public/mandatory health insurers actually cover this. Even the language reflect this, since they're called "homeopathic pharmaceuticals".
It's also economically unsound and technologically misguided, since nuclear power cannot replace the role gas has in the European grid.
"Much of anything" is a malevolent exaggeration. Germany is basically changing its entire stance on military spending, sending tons of weapons and other supplies to Ukraine, taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees and risking its economy by enacting strong sanctions and getting off imports from Russia eventually. For some people that is "not much of anything", but I suspect there is an agenda...
A refugee crisis isn't all that bad by the way. Politically it's a problem but economically a 2016 scale refugee crisis every year would be quite good for Germany. Germany needs huge amounts of people, especially people working in trades, to do the work necessary to switch heat pumps, install solar, build more housing etc. They have to come from somewhere and demographics means they have to come from a massive increase in immigration.
I don't see the major arguments against nuclear power being negated by either climate change or the war in Ukraine. So no, there is no mistake. Nuclear power isn't the right way forward for Germany.
Sorry, I don't get this. Of course your opposition on something can be based on ideology. That is the case if your opposition is more based on your history and tradition than on current facts.
I personally think that there are enough facts to say that nuclear is not really a great option, but I also think that the Green's opposition is based more on ideology (i.e. because they have been historically against it) than on facts. For me, that is evident when they talk more about nuclear risks in general than about financial considerations.
Most of the Germans who would vote against nuclear power have nothing to do with any combination of "Greens", "Socialists", "Hippies" or whatever other pejorative you can come up with. Individuals largely decide this on their own and the consensus was reached.
If you think Greens are opposed to nuclear power because "they always been against it", you just never heard them out and just assume that. Ignorance is bliss, I guess.
You're right. We need to go one level deeper on that.
Germans hate nuclear power, because they were subject to well constructed propaganda, that very well exploited Chernobyl events.
This propaganda was result of political plays, but did not called to any political views by itself. Thus the current situation, where most Germans think it's reasonable stance, while living surrounded by harmless nuclear reactors everywhere in Europe and burying thousands of people dying due to coal pollution.
The fact is there are lots of legitimate concerns about the risks around nuclear technology, with and without nuclear weapons in the mix. Opposition to nuclear power is driven by a different tolerance of such risk and especially a lower trust in what some scientists say about the risks, after they had been wrong a few times. Not all scientists, because quite a few don't see nuclear power as a risk worth taking. To me, what you are doing is itself dishonest and ignorant, by broadly calling all of this "propaganda".
Let me tell you some facts: * Current number of nuclear plants in the world:440 (103 in EU) * Current number of high profile nuclear plant failures in the world: 2 * Direct victims of the nuclear plants failures: less,than 300(direct), less than 19k (indirect, non confirmed) * Coal victims:800k PER YEAR. This x40 as much. * Just for the comparison - wind power death tool is similar to nuclear plants.
Enshuldigung, aber, if anyone is on arbitrary side it's you(in my opinion). No hard feelings. My country had bias for the miners also, which pushed us for many shitty decisions.
You are simply lying and dishonest. Coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power. Nor can you stop climate change with the level of nuclear power (and thus risk thereof) we have right now. There would need to be a nuclear industry in virtually every country, including the less trustworthy ones.
You think the situation around nuclear weapons right now is contained? Wait until most of Asia and Africa have nuclear plants and can think about weaponization. Dirty bombs with stolen nuclear waste within a few decades are almost guaranteed.
Good thing, that decisions in Europe will stop Asia and Africa :) /s
> You are simply lying and dishonest.
Where exactly?
> Coal is not the only alternative to nuclear power.
What is? Assuming you need this in "virtually every country", and some of the richest (such as Germany) fail to implement alternatives, you expect "less thrustworthy" to somehow manage it?
> Dirty bombs with stolen nuclear waste within a few decades are almost guaranteed.
And again, how exactly blocking nuclear plants in Germany changes anything here?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kensilverstein/2016/07/13/are-f...
There may indeed a counterargument in that right-wingers and Neonazis are pro-nuclear because they hate those who rationally say no to the risks.
I am also quite doubtful about someone asserting we could just use nuclear powerplants for substituting gas peakers, that's not how things work.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Atomkraft-Befuerworter-fuer-BASE-P...
> "An extension of the service life would not make Germany less dependent on Russian natural gas, since gas is only used to a small extent for electricity production in Germany, adds König. In addition, Russia is an important supplier of uranium and fuel elements, which are absolutely necessary. In view of the fact that the six active nuclear power plants would have contributed 12 percent to Germany's electricity supply in 2020, the great effort required to start up the nuclear safety apparatus again is not worth it. "With renewables, we can achieve our goals of climate protection and independence from Russia much more safely, quickly and cheaply," says König."
Enough nuclear fuel could be easily shipped to Germany, unlike the necessary natural gas.
Roughly 1/3 is used for heating, 1/3 is used by the industry. None of those can be replaced by electricity in the short run, nuclear or otherwise. Probably only part of that could even replaced by electricity in the long run. Only 14% is used for power generation, but this part is for the "we need more power right now for current demand, and not more power in 10 hours after we've started the nuclear plant".
> Replacing 12% of the electricity supply with something other than Russian gas, along with the other measures being taken, is enough to eliminate 100% of Russian gas imports.
Completely wrong, sorry...
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...
They are usually not used that way because their base load is needed.
Also, if you do not know that, you might reflect about what other facts relevant to forming an educated opinion on the topic you are missing.
Peaking power plants are typically used to provide the extra electricity needed when the supply of renewables start to fall off in the evening and the increased demand from HVAC and other loads coincide. They ramp fast (or start in a spinning reserve mode) to supply power in 5 to 10 mins. Nuclear plans can ramp but they're not really designed to ramp to replace all of the gas peakers.
Another issue is that the grid requires a certain amount of connected inertia in order to resist changes in frequency. Imbalance between generation and loads will lead to frequency changes. Frequency changes can affect motors, fans, negatively (over fluxing leading to premature failure), so there are typically protection systems that disconnect loads or generation outside of a nominal frequency band. Renewables compound this problem because they are variable (generation fluctuates), and because they are inverter based and provide no physical inertia. Therefore, as you increase renewables only, you see greater problems with frequency stability.
To combat the frequency issues today, you use more agile generators (typically gas) that can provide some inertia but also do fast power changes to arrest changes in frequency and restore system frequency (see primary frequency response).
It's hard to see how turning off all gas and displace it with nuclear will work unless you expect nuclear to provide all of the primary frequency response, which includes needing to both increase AND reduce power to stabilize frequency. Large nuclear plants with high inertia generators on their steam turbines do help keep frequency more stiff though, so that's helpful.
If you were to use nuclear to replace gas, you'd also need to make them fast ramping to manage variable renewables. Or you could retain some gas to be the variable load management units, but then you'd basically be keeping gas peakers.
Alternatively, if there is greater adoption of energy storage to help make renewables more dispatchable with more predictable power, that solves part of the frequency issue. I believe gas peakers typically run for under 4 hours a day, so 4 hour duration energy storage would be effective at retiring a lot of the gas except for that kept available as emergency power plants during disasters or weather events.
Part of the frequency and inertia problem will also get solved in the next decade or so. Generators provide an electrical response to the rate of change of frequency that serves to stabilize frequency called the inertial response. Essentially, the change in kinetic energy from one rotational velocity to a lower one results in an uncommanded power injection into the grid. This power injection then counteracts the lack of generation that led to the initial drop of frequency. Inverters are starting to get deployed with grid forming capability in which they can provide synthetic inertia, and over the next decade could reduce the need for synchronous inertia.
It's not an easy problem to solve so I always take sweeping recommendations with a grain of salt.
(I have been doing control system design for gas turbines, batteries, and renewable/thermal/battery hybrid systems for 15 years).
The article seems rather dismissive towards many real problems like availability of nuclear fuel and personnel. The report also clearly states that due to the lack of fuel the nuclear power plants would only be able to supply additional power in late 2023. And it does not mention at all one of the conclusions in the report, that if it comes to a situation where the gas supply from Russia is shut off Germany would compensate with coal power plants.
if we want to discuss about electricity generation, coal is the thing that germany could reduce with nuclear, but not gas. it's always the same thing about these articles, blame germany for a mistake (shutting down nuclear too early) but than just blame it on the bad gas, which is basically needed for nuclear operations anyway...
and no german citizens won't replace their gas heating because of the war, that will simply not happen (of course some people do reduce gas heating but a lot of people just can't).
Such as?
And how do you do this in a building never designed for this king of system?
The heat pump will have a coefficient of performance over five for small temperature differentials. For huge differentials, the thermal loss of the building is linear in the differential, and dropping the thermostat a few degrees only drops a few percent of thermal loss. In those scenarios, the COP of the heat pump is still something like 1.5 or 2.
It's an extremely heterogeneous dataset, but a cursory analysis does not agree:
Germany: 136 kWh/m^2
https://bpie.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iBROAD_CountryFac...
US: 47000 Btu/ft^2 — because we like dumb units — 148 kWh/m^2
https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/looking-at-energy...
That's a slight win for Germany, but it's not by much. For the most part, US houses are simply larger than German ones, which is where that energy use comes from. (US temperatures are also harsher, in both directions.)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/07/new-heat...
My parents in France ditched their 40 year old gas furnace for a heat pump, more than 50% subsidized by the French government, and they couldn’t be happier.
If Germany wanted to switch everyone over to a different kind of lightbulb they'd need to ensure the production capacity to make the new bulb exists and set up logistics to actually distribute it. You'd have a fair amount of non-compliance due to paranoia and other factors but I think you could probably get it done with a year or two of warning... Once you hand the household the lightbulbs they just go through and replace them all and dispose of the old bulbs...
To change out a heating system you need to remove large appliances, install other large appliances, fiddle around with gas lines and the breaker panel (probably you'd need to replace a fair number of breaker panels in older houses to handle the higher throughput), deal with the wiring which might be unsafe for the power you'll be sending over them... then you'd need to actually install the radiators, that involves tearing up floors to do it right (floor radiation can be extremely efficient and generally creates a higher apparent heat than traditional radiators placed next to windows for fire hazard reasons), or else popping in some other more module style of radiator. Those radiators might use direct electric generation or you might opt for additional boiler capacity (much more sane for efficient stand-radiators) which comes with piping requirements along with a lot more wiring work.
All of that is in addition to all the problems I mentioned around lightbulbs - you're still going to need to actually produce and distribute all the material needed to execute this change.
If you, as a person, want to swap out the heating in your house it'll be a weeks (maybe if you're lucky) or months long renovation - imagine trying to do that on the scale of a country, the only way it'd be even plausible is if you essentially drafted large portions of the population and trained them up on trades - that might not be a terrible economic investment, but it certainly isn't going to happen fast.
My only rebuttal is heat pumps can heat the air directly. No need for a radiator or plumbing.
You can't even do widow AC style units.
They're relatively affordable and extremely popular in places where retrofits of buildings without central air are common.
This isn't at all a counter to your statement, just an interest fact nugget.
Touché
Both are based on warm water pipes.
The generic issue with heat pumps AFAIK is that they have only a relatively small range of temperatures (outside) in which they are actually efficient, in the sense that (with old prices of energy) they are competitive with gas in costs, I believe that Germany is a bit too cold.
Heat pumps are actually pretty efficient, down to low temperatures. Have a look at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVIot1ubOZd... where Alec discusses that.
Around Chicago you can expect to have only a few days in winter where the COP is bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...
Still, to give you a single datapoint, I just replaced on a unit a small gas heater with a heat pump and it was really a "swap one unit with the other", still a few issues came out:
1) the cost of the unit, even considering that it doubles as air conditioning/refreshing was only affordable because of some government subsidies (think of 6-7,000 Euro compared to 2,000 Euro for a gas heater and 2,500 Euro for a more traditional conditioning unit)
2) for some reasons, the heat pump is much slower in heating, the net result (in my specific case) is that the unit needs to be kept slightly heated on weekends (it is a small shop that closes saturday and sunday) otherwise when it opens on monday it will take forever to reach a suitable temperature.
Besides, from an infrastructure point of view, if many people change from gas to electrical (though gas powered heat pumps do exist, BTW) the local increase of consumption from the grid needs to be taken into account.
Retrofits can be hard though, since the water loop may be designed for a rather high temp... though there are some heatpumps that get to rather high temps.
Heat pumps are a drop-in replacement if you have forced-air heating, but if you have hot-water radiators, it's not so easy. In theory, you could add another stage, but now you're sacrificing a lot of COP. New buildings should always be built with heat pumps (and heat exchangers) but old buildings take a lot of work to fix.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43XKfuptnik
Yes, it's a solution that requires a significant investment in (individual) infrastructure, but so does almost every other solution to anthropogenic climate change. If the solutions were totally easy, we'd have done them by now. Moving to heat pumps is on the easier end of the spectrum, though.
Less efficient portable heaters can be used as stopgap measures, qualified heat pump technicians can be brought in from other countries, people with transferable skills can works as installation assistants, local production of electric heating systems can be increased (convert other factories if needed).
It's Spring in Germany right now. They've got about 6 months until next winter rolls around and should use that time wisely.
Our apartment complex uses a small central gas power plant to produce electricity and use the waste heat for heating/water, supplying about 20 buildings with roughly 500 - 1000 units. Replacing that system is not something that’s planned and executed within a handful of months. I’m not convinced that air heatpumps of the required size even exist - drilling for a ground heat pump in a city will require even more planning.
How well would it work if all of those unit just pulled another extra 5kw continuously from the grid for heating, not to speak of warm water? I’m not even convinced that the grid itself could sustain that - it’s never been planned for that kind of usage.
Shows how little the author understands about German politics. Greens are also ideologically against delivering weapons into crisis areas, however they were the ones pushing for weapons delivery the strongest. Also they gave up on getting out of coal earlier which was their main goal in this government.
Why? Because they are doing Realpolitik. They do what’s best possible in those circumstances.
It’s not just the politics that say no to a prolongation of nuclear power, but the companies running nuclear as well. Just like shutting down nuclear power plants needs years of planning ahead running them needs as well.
In the end it’s now not just cheaper and more practical to build up renewables than building new nuclear, but even more than keeping the old crumbling ones running.
The fact that the Greens have been flexible in some elements of their politics doesn't mean they are committed to a realpolitik approach when it comes to energy generation. They absolutely are not. In fact their record when it comes to science is really spotty, as they also oppose transgenics and even animal experimentation to a certain degree. They are clouded by preconceptions that are dangerous to us all.
Also you can have similar problems with nuclear too. In the last 4 months Germany has been exporting a lot of electricity to France because several nuclear reactors of the same type had to be shut down because they may have a common flaw.
The problem you describe is serious, but I would guess over 90% of nuclear power generation in the continent remains unaffected, if not more. So a grid here makes a lot of sense, and works as a reliable alternative. It is also pretty easy to design a grid that does not rely on the same types of reactors.
A 2/3 majority is needed in both the Bundesrat (senate) and Bundestag (house). Not happening.
> This is what they say: The existing nuclear reactors should have passed a lengthy security inspection in 2019, which they didn’t pass since they would close at the end of 2022. They would need to pass such an inspection, and it takes a long time.
> ...
> Yes, of course Germany can afford to take some more time to pass these inspections!
The author makes it sound like those are cars which can be easily refitted, upgraded and certified. This would take enormous amounts of time and money for the three plants which are still online, and who knows how much for the ones which are offline. Let's say it would just take a year (very optimistic), it wouldn't have any effect on the conflict.
It's simply not worth it, when the money could be spent on other technologies. It would probably be easier and much cheaper to build new nuclear power plants (like ThorCon which was on HN a few days ago).
Absolutely not ever going to happen.
> The author makes it sound like those are cars which can be easily refitted, upgraded and certified. This would take enormous amounts of time and money for the three plants which are still online, and who knows how much for the ones which are offline.
Even Lindner says that extending the lifetime of nuclear power plants isn't really a realistic option. With what the FDP said in the past and what they are saying now this makes me really believe that there is something more to the whole debate than the fundamental opposition of the green party towards nuclear power.
> It's simply not worth it, when the money could be spent on other technologies.
It likely is. Nuclear isn't really a feasible option for short term actions. Given the political barriers and the progress of the nuclear exit it would be an extremely long play with little to no effects on the current conflict. My gut feeling is that investing this into increasing renewables and investing into improving the energy efficiency of buildings (where the majority of gas import goes) has a significantly bigger impact on energy requirements.
Generally this is a debate that nobody seems to want to have. Everybody is talking about how we can substitute energy imports. Everybody talks about LNG terminals, storage facilities and nuclear power but nobody talks about the low hanging fruits. We do have basically free measures to take to at least slighly reduce the fossil fuel consumption. Mandatory home office availability for suitable jobs, car free/reduced days, speed limits, encouraging less heating, etc.
Lindner: Not on my watch we don't
My guess is that there is somewhere a non public classified report titled something like: "Reassessment of the safety of Nuclear Power plants using modern standards and in context of environmental catastrophes." With a conclusion of: "PANIC!!!".
Just as an example one of the nuclear power plants is build on a geographic fault line...
The real thing is that Germany has NS and NS2 and so they're happy to just guzzle gas.
> The real thing is that Germany has NS and NS2 and so they're happy to just guzzle gas.
NS2 is dead. They stopped certification, dismissed all employes and it's sanctioned by Germany/EU and the U.S.
I think what a lot of people don't realize is that Germany just had a major political shift after the election last year. The new government now has to work around the failures of the last 16 years, in which nothing really got done. It really is a rock and a hard place. Stop all Russian imports and kill the economy, or try to find other sources (LNG from Qatar) and switch as fast as possible. Both options are bad, and the minister is also not happy but has to make it work somehow.
If it takes longer than a year, fine, it’s something that should have been started years ago but there’s no other time available to us than the present and future, so let’s try the present. Solar+Wind+Batteries are a necessary but not sufficient part of a future energy plan for a large industrialized nation, so see if infrastructure that already exists today is usable and can be brought back online in a useful capacity for a bill of materials competitive with the alternatives.
Russian coal imports are projected to go down to 25% (from 50%) in the next month or so, and by autumn should be more or less zero. Independence from gas should be achieved by 2024. LNG terminals will be build and floating LNG terminals have been secured.
[1] https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Pressemitteilungen/2022/03/...
That's about the same timeframe which could be reasonably expected for the recertification/upgrading/etc. of the nuclear plants. The goal is to get independent of Russia.
The war in Ukraine remains us of one thing: You don't want unpredictable things to happen around a nuclear plant. Nuclear power can be relatively cheap. If you subsidize it heavily. If you scale it up (and thus the risks) to drive down costs. If and only absolutely nothing goes wrong. No unforeseen natural catastrophes. No other "impossible accidents" of the kind that keep happening. Absolutely no possibility for ill intentions...
Stopping the import of Russian gas now instead of allowing more time does absolutely nothing for Ukraine except for a little bit of moral support, while tanking the German economy. Russia is already in a downward spiral.
All of that assumes none of those countries start using their new nuclear industry to get nuclear weapons. The world is unsafe as it is with some rogue/rogue-ish states having them. And dirty bombs are even easier, especially with all the nuclear waste being produced and stored... somewhere.
You truly believe that stopping to transfer multiple millions a day to Russia will not have any effect in how it spends money? Even though, in your words, they're in a downwards spiral?
Russia is financially teetering on the edge of bankruptcy (if they haven't gone over yet). Wars are expensive. The absolute best the EU could do right now to affect the war is to stop purchasing Russian gas for a week. Sure, that will have repercussions inside the EU. It'll also significantly cut into the resources available to Russia to spend on the war.
Clearly, it would have. But not in the military, certainly not in the short term.
Russia can be completely bankrupt and still keep destroying all of Ukraine for years. A year to phase out all Russian imports? With most of it gone a lot sooner? Not that big a deal.
Russia's budget surplus is at all-time high now due to increased fuel prices. I recommend you to revise your sources of information, they may have misled you about that "defaut"
I think it shows us instead that Germany worked hard to put itself into position where it is strategically aligned with Russia, and is willing to sacrifice life and freedom of everyone around to keep it that way.
Putin-Merkel is the new Molotov-Ribbentrop.
b) Because it's not politically tenable.
c) Because nuclear energy has long since been a minor part of electricity generation, and it wouldn't make much of a difference now.
d) Because it has nothing to do with imports of Russian gas and oil, which is overwhelmingly used for heating, fuel, and industrial purposes. Gas (not just from Russia) only makes up less than 10% of electricity generation. Oil is virtually not used at all for that.
e) Because it's by far the most expensive way of generating electricity, and would not be economically viable without massive subsidies. France's EDF is tens of billions in debt and would be bankrupt without the government backstopping them.
f) Because long-term storage of nuclear waste is still not properly solved.
g) Because mining nuclear materials is an ecological disaster. Also, guess who's a big exporter of uranium in Europe? Russia.
h) Because our long-term plan to switch to renewable sources of energy has been in full swing for over 20 years, and is coming along nicely with fossil fuels more and more getting phased out.
Bonus point: It's incredibly funny how the people who complain about us shutting down our nuclear power plants pretty much always come from countries that have a substantially lower share of renewable energy than we do (ours is at around 45% now) and often import more gas from Russia at least on a per-capita basis then we do, too.
How will Germany solve base load generation for power and heating without nuclear or fossil fuels in a country with weather as shit as Germany? Some of your points are reasonable but they are mostly silly, especially without any discussion of the elephant in the room. Anything else is greenwashing garbage.
(lived in Frankfurt for a spell and will never go back. Nuclear-neutral, I dig it but whatever's cheapest is ok for me. Techno-positive on climate change. If you want to be ecological move somewhere tropical, live simple and never leave)
Yes. Sure. The country is roughly 4 times smaller than Germany, the population is 10m vs 83m in Germany and you don’t get continental climate.
Germany uses fossil fuels because they want to, not because they have to.
Gas power plants which will be upgraded to burn more and more hydrogen distributed using existing Erdgas infrastructure stored in subterranean salt caverns produced by surplus energy using electrolyzers.
For shorter term swings are compensated with a mix of demand management, solid batteries, redox flow batteries, underwater pumped hydro, .... What evers s cheapest for the usecase
Cameco could easily restart Rabbit Lake and McArthur River. Supply is no issue. Claiming that mining uranium is an "ecological disaster" is disingenuous. It's not excessively dangerous relative to other mining operations.
>g) Because mining nuclear materials is an ecological disaster. Also, guess who's a big exporter of uranium in Europe? Russia.
These are real problems, however I've seen people state that they are entirely results of political decisions that could be revoked.
That's because the reactor waste can be recycled to make more power, reducing the fuel and the waste problem tremendously.
I guess that there are conventional excuses not to, something about proliferation of weapons-grade nuclear material.
But I don't understand why this matters if climate change is real and lots of countries have nuclear weapons anyway. Though I suppose not Germany.
This is a bogus point, FWIW. Nuclear energy is the only energy source that we expect to substantially internalize its externalities.
All other forms have significant externalities that we just ignore. Some so great, such as coal-- that if we internalized them we wouldn't rightfully think of it as a source of energy at all: Just carbon capture alone will take more energy than burning the coal yielded, and that's before getting into all its other costs such as the considerable mortality due to its pollution and the radioactive emissions that eclipse those of nuclear plants.
* About 35% of Germany’s gas is used to generate electricity.
* Eliminating German electricity from gas would thus nearly eliminate Germany’s purchase of Russian gas.
The author seems to have taken the 35% figure from https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Germanys-Growing-Gas... where is is labeled "Power" in the chart. Whatever that is supposed to mean. But it is not electricity. I could not find any public information about this on: https://www.rystadenergy.com/energy-themes/commodity-markets....
Also some gas plants are used for electricity/heat co-generation so you cannot simply replace them with nuclear. Gas peaker plants have a completely different usage from nuclear plants.
Given that burning gas in modern electricity gas plants (like Germany has) to power modern decent quality heat pumps is more efficient (and flexible, and future proof) then burning Gas for heating that would be the best solution.
It's also completely unrealistic.
Given how common gas powered house central heating is, and given that some houses have worse constructs (like gas heater per apartment for warm water) I would guess that we would need 1 heat pump per 100 people or more. That would be 800_000 modern decent quality heat pumps. Which all need to be produced, build, shipped and installed.
We already have a shortage of craftsman in Germany, even if we ignore everything up to installation that would be a major problem.
And that's under the assumption that houses can be retrofitted to use heat pumps. But for many houses, especially apartment blogs this would be a problem as there is no good way available to montage/connect the outside-of-house parts of a heat pump on many typical German apartment blogs (living in apartment in apartment blogs is normal in Germany). (You still can do it, but even more cost and time involved).
There are other problems, too.
So I guess the optimal solutions is practically not possible.
Most of the time, you just punch a small hole in an exterior wall, and run the compressor lines through that.
Edit: regarding supply, millions of heat pump hot water heaters and millions of air to air heat pumps are sold each year:
https://www.iea.org/reports/heat-pumps
They generally cost under $10,000, so some military could jusy buy the world supply for $10-100B and ship them to Europe. The US military could find that in its couch cushions.
However, Germany usually only installs 10,000's per year; more installers would be needed.
Only on nights with temperatures below -5 Celsius gas is cheaper.
The problem is that most vendors are sold out.
With larger apartment complexes it may be economically feasible to pursue geothermal heat. In this case a more efficient solution could be a heating arrangement using hydronic heating combining geothermal heat, waste heat, topped off with an efficient large-scale boiler (the apartments need hot water anyway), and then pumped into radiators or underfloor heating.
And naturally the most efficient solution of all could be district heating.
> since I studied them in grad school. They’re talking about
> a baseline risk of serious accident of around 0.001%, or
> one in 100,000 years
Why are people still referring to these numbers when talking about nuclear safety? They are obviously off by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude.
We build about 250 nuclear plants over the past 50y, and we had two disasters that displaced thousands of peoples and made huge area inhabitable for centuries.
I argue this is not the fault of the plant designer or technology. With enough effort, almost anything can be turned into a bomb.
Accident 2 (Fukushima): Plant designers ignored tsunami warning signs in the area, and also put the backup generators underground in a costal area. This was a screw up in the risk model's input.
Ignoring that, 250 * 50 = 12,500, so the prediction is within an order of magnitude.
The choice is between running 6 plants for a year or two with those odds, or actively funding ongoing genocide. This isn't a particularly difficult instance of the trolley problem.
Also considering human error, I don't see more plants equaling less human errors, needing more workers my drop the quality of workers. No one wants Homer Simpson running their local plant.
Looking at yearly consumption graphs completely ignores the reality of the grid. Where do you get electricity from for the peaks in the morning and the evening, when solar is still weak and wind may or may not be blowing? Not nuclear, for sure. Maybe coal, but even those plants have response times measured in hours (whereas gas is more in the tens of minutes). And there's only so much hydro you can build.
Why.
The technology certainly can be used for peaker plants. But at grid scale? That would be an entirely novel design. I don't think any such plants exist outside of warships.
Stable supply is the answer to unstable demand. That means nuclear is the answer to this problem.
If that baseline isn’t high enough, then they need more nuclear - not less.
Nuclear is really bad at reacting to swings in demand since it's ramp up and down speed is limited. Adding more slowly changing sources to a network makes it even worse at reacting to those swings, Risking net stability which curiously has increased with introduction of more renewables to the network.
France gets 70% of their energy production from nuclear and they are not dealing with destabilization. Germany never crossed the 30% mark. They can drastically increase their nuclear to actually deal with the destabilization problem that they do have.
But I doubt this, many of the reactors have already been operating beyond what they where designed for. Like from what I know about them I honestly wouldn't be surprised if previous safety inspections wouldn't already have slightly looked away to allow them to pass.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/us/politics/russia-uraniu...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/stop-buying-uranium-from-russia...
France payments enable Russia to stay a nuclear power.
I do not want to take sides, for our prosperity as humans I tend to agree that nuclear may be a big part of the solution. On the other hand realistically almost no area is safe from disaster (naturally, politically). Risk management is key here, you can not assume that everything works out as planned.
I remember reading "The Children of Schewenborn" in school and being really disturbed by it. Pretty sure I wasn't alone in that.
Good times!
and at least where I went to School in the 2000s discussion of pros and cons of nuclear power where covered a lot but where rather objective.
Most strong anti nuclear movements in my generation (and local area) came from associations outside of school, e.g. parents.
As far as I can tell there was a very strong anti-nuclear movement in the generations which are now 50-70 or so, i.e. the Generation which currently probably has most influence in the politics.
Through in defense of the Green party it was not them but the CDU (~moderate conservative party) which did speed up the shutdown of nuclear power after (somewhat?) reassessing the safety of German power plans after Fukushima. Given that the CDU is very business orientated and this wasn't good business this says a lot about the state of the remaining nuclear power plants IMHO.
EDIT: As a side note IMHO the German Green party are hypocrites, don't think of them as a strongly environmental focused party. They pretend to be one but in the end aren't really that. (Through environmental protection still matters for them anyway.)
I started writing this comment with just about the opposite point of view I finished writing it with. Oh well, it happens. But energy is power, it can be used for good or evil, it's not strictly evil, and in fact if you want to do good you'll need power to do it.
I think the author has this backwards. Climate change will cause more and more crises. Those will distract us from fighting climate change and therefore accelerate it further.
Keeping a cool head and not forgetting about the environment during war is exactly what I expect from a serious politician. It is not about prioritizing one over the other, it is about seeing them in context.
1. Legal hurdles. "The previous law was changed to close the nuclear power plants after Fukushima."
2. Safety. "To keep the reactors open in 2023, Germany would need to accept accelerating the risk assessment and maybe living without some retrofittings."
3. Fuel. "The reactors would then need new fuel, which would take 12-15 months to arrive, and would require a doubling of manufacturing capacity."
4. Spare parts. "They also fear that some spare parts would be lacking because there is no further market in Germany for them."
5. Personnel. "People have been retiring and no new ones have been trained, so it would be hard to get the people."
6. Economics. "With lack of clarity on spare parts and personnel, how can we commit to a reliable delivery or energy? We can’t be 100% confident."
7. Energy replacement. "Until the new nuclear fuel is in place, we would make up for the shortage with more electricity coming from coal and gas."
The current minister in charge (Robert Habeck) is part of the greens, who were one the most parties most opposed to russia and it's energy (staunchly against North Stream 2) and Habeck shares these views according to his public mentions.
To start with, yes, his later (up to today) involvement with Gazprom is a scandal, bordering on corruption. But had nothing to do with German politics after 2005.
He might have been too friendly towards Russian gas, but Germany used Russian gas for many decades before him and the largest mistakes, which we suffer from today, have been made made by the governments which followed his. And I say this as someone who always opposed him.
While deciding about exiting nuclear energy long-term during his government, the switch to renewables was started. If the following governments had fully stuck to that, the situation would already be significantly different. And of course, however much gas you use, tying Germany so much to one supplier was the greatest mistake of all, especially after 2008 and 2014. There would have been ample time of adjusting energy politics to the changed situation, but nothing has been done.
As we all know, each administration has absolutely 0 effect on any future or past administration.
> which we suffer from today, have been made made by the governments which followed his
But not his?
> While deciding about exiting nuclear energy long-term during his government, the switch to renewables was started. If the following governments had fully stuck to that, the situation would already be significantly different.
Weird how that worked out for him then. Must be entirely coincidental; couldn't be because the most powerful people in the world wanted it. Certainly no one from any of the current administration will be found to be beneficiaries of GAZPROM or other oil companies that benefit from keeping renewables and nuclear out of Germany.
Incredibly naive take on the situation tbh. The bourgeois class is literally wasting trillions all around the world on rockets to space, mega yachts, underground car tunnels and whatever pet project, and OP wants us to believe we simply don't have the resources to build nuclear plants that we could make in the 1960's? lmfao.
Germany is surrounded by other countries with nuclear power.
Russian sabotage would be an act of war.
If Germany is at the point where Russia is attacking its nuclear power plants, I sure hope it’s not in a position where it depends on Russian gas.
In the end designing a nuclear power plant to survive shelling might not mitigate that much risk, but it is something being seriously considered in many circles.
Even if you don't, I promise you Putin understands the difference between attacking a plant in Ukraine and attacking one in Germany.
At the point where people are attacking something in Germany that line becomes meaningless.
> At the point where people are attacking something in Germany that line becomes meaningless.
Exactly my point. I'm not saying desperation and ego won't drive him (along with everyone else) into the abyss, I'm saying he's savvy enough to know that right now, that line is protecting him.
Let’s assume he’s extremely unlikely to attack Germany. What about his successor, and his successor’s successor? It’s unfortunate but many “crazy” people have ended up running dictatorships.
So it’s quite possible for war between nuclear powers to avoid that level of escalation.
And there are no circumstances where you're better off fighting an adversary that supplies all of your energy than having your own nuclear reactors.
If you can’t conceive of a situation that having a nuclear power plant inside your country is dangerous you simply don’t know enough about them. Sabotage of a spent fuel cooling pond could get really nasty. It’s not the kind of risk anyone is taking that seriously for reasons I agree with, but it’s definitely possible.
There are more straight forward ways to cause damage.
It is quite staight forward to poison food supply chain, water supply, a dirty bomb is easy to make amd acessible to many rogue states
Why would Russia go through the trouble of infiltration and covert ops of a well-secured and monitored installation that is in the middle of nowhere and will d9 minimal damage, if they have chemical weapons, Bioweapons, can make dirty bombs and have nukes at their disposal?
That’s an unreasonably high bar which invites “fantastic scenario” as such I referred to something I don’t consider reasonable, but it is possible.
> Why would Russia go through the trouble
If you want a more plausible scenario, causing immense harm in a deniable fashion is possible when a attacking a nuclear power plant that isn’t possible with widespread chemical weapons etc. Issue a public apology, have the guy ordering the attack executed, and yet the harm stays.
I am not suggesting it’s likely Russia is going to attack Germany in the next 50 years. All I am saying is nuclear power plants have one more failure mode that should be considered. These things are built tough, Ukraine’s only lost 1.3 GW of capacity after the attack that’s no big deal. That said, considering them as a military not just a terrorist target is no longer a fantasy scenario it’s part of the long term risk calculation.
To be clear, most people will likely run the numbers and say it’s an acceptable risk, which is fine as long as they actually run the numbers.
What happened in the Ukraine lately was no such thing, it was conquering a nuclear plant and the plant itself was not damaged in the process. Still irresponsible and criminal, (like the whole war) - but not the same as targeting a nuclear plant, with the intention to destroy.
As far as analysis goes you can’t limit things to exactly what happened. If attacking nuclear power plants is on the table then a single miscommunication means someone is attempting to destroy it. Even just destroying some water pipes or some generators could lead to very serious issues.
Source? As far as I know and what wikipedia confirms, is that the plant itself was not damaged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaporizhzhia_Nuclear_Power_Pla...
"During approximately two hours of heavy fighting a fire broke out in a training facility outside of the main complex, which was extinguished by 6:20am,[21][22] though other sections surrounding the plant sustained damage.[19]
As of 04:20 UTC on March 4, the IAEA said that the fire, which was in a training building, had been extinguished. It did not impact reactor safety or any essential equipment"
From here: https://energo.dtek.com/en/media-center/press/dtek-tpps-comp... * As a result of an armed attack by the invaders on the Zaporozhia NPP, 1.3 GW of capacity generated by nuclear units has been lost.*
If the power plant was I damaged it wouldn’t have lost capacity.
The link stated it was not damaged, so another explanation would be it was partly shut down. Missing crew, safety precautions, who knows. It is a warzone.
> In its statement the SNRIU said Zaporozhe's six power units "remain intact, the unit 1 reactor compartment auxiliary buildings have been damaged, which does not affect the safety of the unit. The systems and components important to the safety of the NPP are operational. At present, no changes in the radiation situation have been registered." https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/IAEA-appeal-afte...
>The fire, in a training building a few hundred metres from the reactors, was extinguished at 06:20 local time, SNRIU said. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had been told the fire at the site had not affected "essential equipment and plant personnel were taking mitigatory actions".
It’s however important to realize reactors need auxiliary systems outside the physical building for cooling. I guess it’s possible the attack was precise enough to avoid such damage, but I can only assume some good luck was involved.
If Russia bombed Ukrainian nuclear plants and sent a cloud of radioactive fallout over Europe, that could be seen as a direct attack against NATO and get them involved in the war. So Russia has a big incentive to not attack nuclear plants.
But if Russia is already willing to attack a NATO country, then it's not clear that they would shy away from bombing nuclear plants, which would act as a distraction as Germany devoted resources to stop the radioactive emissions.
The only thing the report says here is that this requires risk/benefit analysis would need to take these factors into account.
To mix it with renewables, you need at least some reasonably fast capacity. How much of the gas generation capacity is baseload capacity that could be replaced with nuclear?
The Nickel and Cobalt parts have been declining for decades and are low percentages of *-ode material, especially in cars which are no volume constrained. Only smartphone batteries or similar appliances have high amounts of those. In fact there some EVs which have less cobalt then normal cars because cobalt steel is used in many parts of the motor and transmission.
This is why something like Li-S is the holy grail of batteries.
I would rather see Li-S be used in planes where inspections are common unlike cars.
For grid storage neither is ideal, as you really want to decouple (dis)charging from capacity. Subterranean normal pressure hydrogen storage (using geological structures like salt caves) or flow batteries seem more promising for that reason.
Having a hydrogen economy is overall pretty inefficient. I think it's largely a dead end. We do not need multi-year energy storage. Seasonal storage is needed at most. Lithium-ion batteries have self-discharge rates of around 2% per month. Even if the batteries lose ~10% over a few months that's an acceptable loss and is superior to the inefficiencies inherent in hydrogen production via electrolysis and the subsequent use of stored hydrogen via fuel-cells — which require platinum-group metals.
For those not playing Sim City, it's a bit more complicated. Governments don't get to do whatever they want, for example. They are bound by law just like everyone else, a principle known as the rule of law. Sure, it was a German guy by the name of Carl Schmitt that came up with some ideas about "emergency laws". And from that moment, it took ten years until democracy was done for (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt#Law_of_emergency_...).
What's the number for since the war began? It's higher right?
That's a lot of coal per year...
20 years to get 20% wind and solar.
Tesla just opened their factory. VW has a nice selection of EVs; Taycan is beautiful!
Don't fathom how they could fix their situation. Too bad they didn't have someone tell them exactly what they should do only 4 years ago.
"We're supposed to protect you against Russia but they're paying billions of dollars to Russia?" Nobody-At-All asked. "I think that's very inappropriate."
Are you talking about the US who went all in on gas for its electricity production or Germany that replaced nuclear power with renewables? And France, the Hacker News nuclear energy utopia, is struggling year-round with its electricity production, but that is easy to ignore if you have no clue what you are talking about.
Also, let me give you a brief history lesson, because Americans like to rewrite it: The US was never tough on Russia. Bush was a Putin fanboy like Schröder. When Schröder called Putin a "perfect democrat", Bush looked into Putin's eyes and saw his soul. And speaking of good advice: That was a time when Germany and the rest of Continental Europe asked the US not to start Iraq war. The US did not appreciate that kind of advice and considered Continental Europe some terrible allies.
These were the early 2000s, there was a thing called the war on terror. Now Americans claim that it was clear as a day that Russia (who also opposed the war and seemed to steadily prosper) was the real enemy back then, and Germany should have bought more ethically-sourced oil and gas from the region with the lack of human rights, the never ending wars and the state-sponsored terrorism, and not from the guy who speaks of brotherhood in fluent German - that would have been the right decision of course!
Anyway, after Bush came Obama, who also treated Russia with baby gloves. The US had no shame to give Lavrov the symbolic reset button months after Russia resetted Georgia - a country that hoped for US support. Remember Obama's "Let me do you favors in my second term" mic leak with Medvedev? Was any of that controversial in America? Not at all. Americans laughed at Mitt Romney when he called Russia the enemy. Biden summed it up in 2015:
> All of us, we all invested in a type of Russia we hoped - and still hope - will emerge one day: a Russia integrated into the world economy; more prosperous, more invested in the international order.
And it doesn't stop here. Americans went and elected the biggest Russian puppet in history. The guy who publicly said he trusts Putin more than his three-letter agencies. Now Putin enjoys a popularity among Americans that would make the old red-scare republicans spin in their graves. On top of that, the US had an ever increasing oil trade with Russia - after they annexed Crimea.
But one time Donny with his "America first! Screw NATO and screw the EU!" stance (which totally doesn't benefit Russia) told German diplomats in one of his incoherent speeches that they are too reliant on Russian gas, after they banned US companies from fracking in their densely populated country and can you believe it, the diplomats laughed!?
IMHO he shrugs of the main issues without discussing in on the technical level you would expect for the risks involved here. He basically argues politics should trump engineering realities to cut corners. While this is usually fine in a startup environment, it's a bad idea for environments like space, healthcare, aviation or nuclear. We all know how it worked out for Boeing recently.
I would really like to see the numbers if you remove some of the heavy industry we don't need to keep running in Europe. This load removed, how much of the remaining base load throughout the hole year is really provided by gas, as this is the true load that could possibly be replaced by nuclear, from 2023 onwards if I may believe other comments.
I'm curious, but I find it hard to believe this would do anything for our friends in Ukraine NOW, so if this is our concern we should probably talk about other levers instead of recycling the nuclear debate.
If the author happens to read this: Please consider not putting that front and centre without a warning.
If a mod happens to read this: Please consider adding a content warning or similar to the link title or somewhere else prominent.
- 65e15 kg = Uranium in Earth's crust
- 709000 MJ/kg = energy density of natural U²
- 500e12 MJ = 500 million TJ annual global energy usage
- 92e6 = 65e15 × 709e3 / 500e12
Nuclear energy is used at scale. Nuclear energy supplies ~70% of French electricity production.
What's more important is the development of nuclear technology. Not all uranium is used in current reactors. The majority of uranium is U238. If breeder reactors were developed, our existing resources could be utilized far more effectively.
Nuclear power financing, accidents, storage and disposal discussions fueled major civil unrest for decades.
Also most of the Russian gas is used in the heavy industries, you can't simply switch those factories to electrical heating. As for electrical heating of households, yeah that was a thing until maybe the eighties? Nobody does that anymore. Not sure our power grid, which is being decentralized, could handle that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...
At the bottom of the heart, it's just:
'Please, not in my backyard.'
According to [1], it‘s 14% (for consumers). This includes a large number of CHP (combined heat and power plants), which produce district heat and cannot be replaced with nuclear power.
Then there‘s 36% of industry usage , of which 1/5 [1] is used for power generation in industry power plants. I‘d assume that quite a few of these on-site power plants do other things too, like CHP, and cannot be replaced with nuclear power. Ignoring this, it’d be
14% + 36%*21% = 21,56% of total Gas used for power, in reality, much less would be replaceable with nuclear.
The EU economic think tank Bruegel claimed [2]:
A technically and politically difficult decision to delay the closure of German nuclear power plants in operation until the end of 2021 could free up another 120 TWh of gas
Germany used 945,3 Twh in 2020[3], of which 94,8% was imported[4] That’s 816,14 Twh.
In 2020 55,2% of the imported gas came from Russia [5], so 494,7 Twh. So, according to Bruegel, a respected European think tank, Germany could replace 24,3% of the Russian gas it imported in 2020, if it managed to re-open its power plants closed in 2021. (the ones put out of use years earlier are being demolished[6]
[1] https://www.springerprofessional.de/erdgas/produktion---prod... [2] https://www.bruegel.org/2022/01/can-europe-survive-painlessl... [3]https://www.weltenergierat.de/publikationen/energie-fuer-deu... [4] https://www.bveg.de/die-branche/erdgas-und-erdoel-in-deutsch...
[5] https://www.t-online.de/finanzen/unternehmen-verbraucher/id_...
[6] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_D...
edit: corrected an error
They rather burn more coal and gas while pretending that renewables will do it all.
I find it strange that the strongest proponents of capitalism and parlamentarism have most trouble understanding this. We can choose with our wallets and our votes to produce less nuclear power, and we will not get brownouts, but the market will "swallow it up" and companies will just produce less energy intensive stuff, and more other stuff.
Also, the biggest problem is not random nuclear meltdowns. The problems are: Nuclear is very centralized, which is something we are trying to get away from. It has not been profitable without subsidies for a long time. It produces nuclear waste, which we still don't know what to do with. And as you can see with the recent events around Chernobyl, it is a liabilty in times of crisis. It is just not worth it.
It was written with a theory in mind ("Irrational German Angst of Nuclear") and only points out things in favor of this theory, sprinkled with some nice diagrams here and there and, to make it appear scientific, a list of footnotes and citations. It's clearly missing out describing the components of the German Energiemix and the areas of usage for gas (i.e. NOT just for electrical power as nuclear is but VERY important as a commodity to the German chemical industry and for heating in civilian housing which cannot be quickly replaced by sth else).
Even worse, it is parroting stereotypes about the Greens party the German conservatives have been busy spinning for decades for political reasons. I'd really like to have a good conversation about this topic but this just reads like a cheap trolling attempt.
I live in Berlin. Unpopular decisions cause people to protest. They protest for/against just about anything you can name. Germans love protesting. Berliners doubly so. It's a good way to gauge how they feel about things. As far as I can recall, nobody took to the streets to prevent a nuclear shutdown. That did not happen. Protests against coal and for the environment on the other hand are very frequent. And lately there have been a lot of anti-vaxers out with the inevitable counter protests happening as well. And of course the Ukraine brings out the crowds. Nuclear, not so much. The only nuclear related protests would have been against it. There are a few people in the press arguing it. Politically, it's been a dead topic. Politicians don't like to associate themselves with unpopular topics and they distanced themselves from nuclear years ago. There are exceptions of course but by and large even conservative parties stopped pushing that agenda.
They could have delayed shutting down plants of course. But they've added more renewable capacity in the last few years than they ever had nuclear capacity. And of course they just doubled down on investing in more renewable energy until 2030. There's 200 billion allocated for that. Compared to that the remaining 8GW of nuclear simply does not matter.
Contrary to the popular belief, gas based generation barely grew in Germany after the nuclear shut down started happening more than a decade ago. Neither did coal. Coal has actually been declining; except for lignite/brown coal.
Fraunhofer has some numbers for 2021: https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/news/2022/publi...
Wind production was actually down due to poor performance of wind turbines that year apparently (weather basically). The slack was mostly picked up by brown coal.
An issue with wind is actually the lack of cable capacity in Germany. A lot of coal production in the south is needed because they lack the ability to import cheaper wind from the north. A lot of the times when the wind mills are not spinning, they are not broken but deliberately turned off. Over capacity is a problem if you can't move power to where it is needed.
Another issue is that rooftop solar is hard to measure in these statistics. That's very popular in Germany and domestic setups of course feed into the local grid. However, how do you account for that? One thing is certain, rooftop solar continues to be very popular and is growing rapidly. Same for batteries. Both effectively remove demand from the grid. Hard to measure but it must be having some effect. The bit of solar showing up in these statistics would be solar plants; not rooftop solar.
A likely outcome of the Ukrainian conflict is an accelerated move away from gas based heating and power generation. You can see some early signs that governments are starting to think about that. Regardless of whether the Russians go back to something resembling peace, I think many countries have gotten the message that they simply can't be depended on loud and clear. At cop26 last year, countries were talking about 2040-2060 time frames for going carbon neutral. Gas was a big part of those plans. I think Russia single-handedly accelerated the ambition level by about 10-15 years in the last month.
Until a few months ago, the German plan basically was to switch from coal (also exported by Russia) to (Russian) gas by 2030. The remaining nuclear (2 or 3 plants) capacity is not enough to matter here. Restarting already decommissioned plants is unlikely to happen and probably would require a sizable investment as well in addition to probably being not popular. Besides, it would not be enough. But you could argue that keeping the few remaining plants going for a few years is not going to hurt anyone in the grander scheme of things. Either way, the Germans need a plan and nuclear is extremely unlikely to be any part of that plan. Building new gas plants is now a lot less likely. The only real alternative is more renewables. Hence the announced 200 billion budget for that.
Now I see that the Germans were right. Russia is not a threat. Putin is a paper tiger. The Russian military is nothing compared to NATO. And Germany gets NATO protection less than cost.
They are acting in their own interest which they understand very clearly, and are succeeding.
Also, I used to think that allowing Germany to remilitarize was desirable. Now I think it would be a mistake. Germany knows what's in its own interest. It will act in its own interest without shame or regret even if it hurts its neighbors (buying energy from Russia helps Germany and Russia but hurts other countries like Ukraine). Allowing the to militarize increases geopolitical risk and doesn't with little reward.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=M...
Ukraine bought energy from Russia, too. They ended gas imports from Russia some time ago, now importing it from other countries, which import it from Russia.
You seem to be suggesting that a direct pipeline is equivalent to buying from the global market. It isn't.
You were claiming that Germany is funding the Putin regime. The US does that too. It bought oil and are still buying uranium from Russia.
> You seem to be suggesting that a direct pipeline is equivalent to buying from the global market. It isn't.
For funding the Putin regime it is not interesting where the US was buying Russian energy. The US funded Putin, too. Trump did that, too.
The data is Russia's humiliating defeat in Ukraine.
"The nation possesses approximately 6,000 nuclear warheads as of 2022—the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world."
Guess where they are directed at.
> Since the Bucha massacre was made public
There is no proof that the people killed in Bucha were killed by departing Russian troops. The Russians are suggesting that the killings were of 'Russian friendly' Ukrainians, killed after the troops left. We won't know what actually happened until a proper inquiry has been done; not feverish reporting from a highly biased US/European press based on Ukrainian govt. claims.
> While Putin and his army destroy Ukraine and commit genocide
There has been no genocide committed in Ukraine. This is a clearly false claim.
Satellite imagery taken before Russian troops left shows massacre happened before withdrawal. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1511060668610457612
I wasn't making any assertions of my own as to who was responsible; I was just pointing out that responsibility has not yet been properly determined and thus should not be asserted as fact as Pueyo is doing here. And I'm not being pedantic; this is an extremely important point. Many propagandistic stories are pushed during a war. We should be careful not to buy into them.
Because of dogma and stupidity
This is apt description of nearly every nation, if not all of them.
They are also paying about 10 x as much as the US in GDP terms for the existing sanctions against Russia, because they do far more trade with the country than the US.
They also have a 40-year history of being unwilling to allow arms exports to anyone but NATO countries and the likes of Switzerland, far more than any other nation, and at considerable costs to local industry.
A dollar spent on nuclear is a dollar that could have much more effect invested in renewables instead.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-nuclear-power-must-be-par... All this talk about "a bygone era" seems to stem from a place of hatred but what is perceived as "old" if anything most techbros and minimalist wannabes seem to hate nuclear.
But if you stop watching the Simpsons and look at the data, you will soon realize that renewables are not able to provide enough reliable energy and this has been proved time after time.
nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z
The real world is made of atoms and people, not dollars. To illustrate: if starting tomorrow, every car produced was electric, it would take 20 years to replace all the cars. Given unlimited money, we could not convert all production of cars to electric in 5 years. The earliest possible switch to all electric cars is like 2050.
We have limited capacity to produce batteries and renewables, and a limited speed at which that production can be expanded.
We also have existing manufacturing capacity for nuclear and staff with skills to build / operate them, and it should be used. It should not be wasted.
There's a saying about that line of logic, isn't there? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
I did the required undergraduate nuclear physics course which at the time was focused on nuclear energy. At the time a very surface level course due to being reduced in size over the years in favor or atomic and quantum physics instead.
I still have Introductory Nuclear Physics [2] sitting in my bookshelf because I never had the chance to sell it, the course was changed to be centered around particle accelerators instead.
That program used to be the prime source of people going into nuclear energy research and development. Today you can't even take it as an master, it died out due to everyone seeing it as a dead end career wise with the advent of renewables.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Sweden
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Nuclear-Physics-Kenneth-...
More Russian gas and oil is used in transport and heating. Nuclear power plants play no role in providing energy for heating, transport, and similar in Germany.
For each item.
Where are you going to get it?
Where does it need to go?
Who's going to make it?
How many do you need?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
Honestly the main reason it ever became that big topic in Germany this because of some catastrophically bad decisions about nuclear storage done in both east and west Germany. Worse at least in West Germany it was _known_ (by the people involved in making it) to be a idiotic decision and seem to have been done mainly to spite eastern Germany...
With nuclear power as the main cure against CO2 production we would need to build thousands of nuclear power plants world wide. Let's say Germany would need a hundred (remember we need to replace gas for heating and oil for traffic). 80 million people. World population is roughly 100 times of that.
Good luck with that.
Nuclear waste buried underground. Didn't work like planned. Now it needs another several billion Euros to deal with that failure.
It took less than 200 years to waste several billion Euros on a failed storage site. It wasn't even for highly radioactive waste.