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csours

If Germany's Green Party takes the same line, I think it will be a huge blow to Russia.

Also, it's about time.

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> I think it will be a huge blow to Russia.

Nuclear or not, they'd still need to have electrified heating and industrial processes dependent on Russian gas.

The amount of natural gas consumed by the industry is already very low.

Germany needs to stop exporting electricity.

Most of export electricity comes from gas turbine topping plant which work during high EU electricity price times.

The German green party demanded a ban on sending weapons to conflict zones just at the end of last year, now they would love to send all our army's equipment to Ukraine immediately.

They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people.

So why shouldn't they make another 180 on their fight against nuclear power, for which they could finally claim victory after the last three nuclear power plants will be switched off by the end of this year.

> They fought tooth and nail for the ban of genertical modified food, but now are in favor of a mandatory mRNA vaccination even for young people.

This is a consistent position. mRNA vaccination is not genetic modification. On the other hand, adenoviral-vector vaccines are genetically modified organisms.

Eating genetically modified food isn't genetic modification, either.

I don't think any credible person or German party ever claimed that. It's the food you're eating that's modified, not that you get genetically modified from eating it

(Of course gmo is a thousand times better than previous practices with random mutation)

You are correct, nobody claimed that. But environmentalists often warned of "unknown risks" [1] when consuming genetically modified food. Why at the same time there should be no unkown risks when injecting mRNA vaccines into children is beyond me.

[1] htts://www.bund.net/themen/landwirtschaft/gentechnik/risiken/gesundheit/?wc=23315

Or rather people felt hat the benefit outweighed the risk. That was just not the case for some people with GMO.

Being able to change your mind is a feature of democracy.

They won't and why should they? Nuclear is done in Germany. They won.

Instead Germany has been the biggest motor for renewable development in the world and now needs to jump back on their own ship after 16 years of conservative stagnation.

Something which is happening right now.

Germany is a lot bigger, and for Germany nuclear power certainly isn't sustainable. The population isn't on board for one thing. For another, the supply chain and the complicated life cycle has a tendency to bind huge amounts of resources and manpower that can't be easily used elsewhere in the economy, if you can find it in the first place (France has a shortage of nuclear engineers for example). Add to that the impossible and horrendously complicated nature of the risk management calculations.

If we started now, we might replace Russian gas in 20 years. We can do that in a year or two with renewable energy and other means while avoiding a lot of the other problems.

>We can do that in a year or two with renewable energy and other means while avoiding a lot of the other problems.

How can you do that? Can you create build storage in 1 year for entire Germany needs? How?, please explain!

Germany is right in the middle of the biggest and most stable grid on this planet. They don't have to build storage within a year because they don't have to store all that stuff. They can take their time and continue to expand their national grid. Something they've been doing even during the last 16 years where the conservative government has been crippling the expansion of renewable energy.

Germany derives 25% of its energy consumption from natural gas. In order to remove this, they'll need to replace it with something. If they want to replace it with renewable energy, then they'll need storage. In no universe can they simply swap 25% of their energy consumption within a year without additional infrastructure.

> Germany derives 25% of its power consumption from natural gas.

It's been barely over 10% in 2021. -10% from the previous year. Please stop spreading lies anybody can google up in seconds: https://strom-report.de/download/strommix-2021-deutschland/

> If they want to replace it with renewable energy, then they'll need storage.

They obviously don't because it took them one year to get rid of 10% of it already. Without any significant expansion of storage capacity or expansion of renewables btw because the previous Goverment was not in for that. This one is.

I don't know where you get those arguments from but you should seriously reconsider those sources.

This source says that natural gas was 25% of Germany's energy consumption: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Your link only covers electricity generation, which is only a part of total energy consumption.

It covers electricity because this is the only sector where nuclear could be relevant. The other sectors like heating and industry use of gas can't be covered by nuclear since electrical heating is negligible in Germany. Didn't you look that up?

You can use nuclear or stored renewables to power a heat pump, which could heat homes for most of the German winter. You’re saying heating is “negligible”, but the fact remains that 25% of all energy consumed in Germany comes from natural gas. There is nothing negligible about that. Also, it seems like you might not be aware, but natural gas has other uses besides heating and electricity. Natural gas is necessary to make hydrogen, which is a key component in making ammonia used for fertilizer. It has other industrial uses as well.

> You can use nuclear or stored renewables to power a heat pump, which could heat homes for most of the German winter.

To even supply something close to a significant amount of homes with heat pumps would take decades. In decades, Germany will be run on renewables completely. Gas or Russia have nothing to do on this level of discussion.

> but the fact remains that 25% of all energy consumed in Germany comes from natural gas

If you just stupidly ignore what I write and repeat the same invalid argument over and over again, it won't become valid.

It is still that 10% which is relevant for the topic here and it can be done next year without having to run a single nuclear reactor a single day longer. This is what will actually happen.

This makes no sense, the other countries will not build storage for Germany and also they will want to build renweables, you present a fake solution.

Building out renewables is the correct action right now. In the readily foreseeable future, building storage will be correct. In the meantime, building factories to build storage is beginning.

All these things take time. Repeating that things still yet to be done have not already been done sheds no light.

"The other countries" do that and they're happy to do it. We just recently got a significant boost from Nordlink. But you don't care about all that don't you? You just want to forcefully project your own attitude and hope that the other side is just as bad informed as you are because this is how that nuclear astro turf works...

Random dudes on Hackernews are pointing out the flaws im Germany's energy policy because with a few minutes of research they can see what experts through years of study and research cannot see...

Storage will be built when it makes sense to build storage. For storage to be useful, you need enought renewables to charge it from.

How? Magic ?

I will buy solar panel for my home now and disconnect from the grid if you are capable provide me with a storage product that makes sense. AFAIK there are no batteries that are safe and make economical sense today and I have no clue what you storage thing you allude too that can be built in 1 year (very convenient of you not to mention what exactly it is you think that storage is that will appear this year if there is a demand)

The topic is utility-scale storage.

For your house, batteries is currently your best alternative. New battery tech is coming online which may turn out to scale down to single home use. Or may not. But even lithium storage gets cheaper every year.

The right mix of storage technologies will very widely according to where it serves.

>The topic is utility-scale storage.

The topic of this thread is storage that you can have built in 1 year, at max 2. Hydro storage takes a lot more time to be built from scratch.

We don't have enough renewable generating capacity to charge storage from, and won't two years from now, either.

You mean Germany has enough storage now that is unused and would also be enough to cover the case where gas is replaced with solar? Any numbers that show this , including say 1 winter week for residential and industry consumption?

What you wrote does not make sense.

OK, we can see in winter this storage put to good use then and in spring you can be happy proving me wrong with statistics that show that in fact Germany managed to replae all gas and nuclear production with solar and batteries.

Solar and wind have been and are being built out. Dropping that to start nukes and wait 10-20 years for any power at all would be strictly worse.

Nobody is asking for stopping building solar or wind, why do you think this is what we are discussing? (it is about some complementary energy source that will help when there is no sun and wind for a few days)

Money is fungible. A dollar spent on a nuke is a dollar not available to spend on building out renewables.

Germany wisely chose to build out renewables, in preference to spending those dollars propping up those ramshackle old nukes.

For home use, the Tesla Powerwall is popular. https://www.tesla.com/powerwall. It gets expensive if you want to ride out several cloudy days in a row.

It's inefficient to have off-grid battery systems for every home. If you can average supply and demand across an entire grid, you need much less storage per person. And you can use storage systems with higher fixed cost but lower cost per kWh, like pumped hydroelectric.

A grid would need to be huge, because I will have a ton of sun at the same time as my neighbors and we all have darkness at the same time. Wind can compensate partially but you still need a 100% solution and don't want to give up your country energy security and depend hard on others because if bad weather happens then they will not send you energy and keep it for thir own population.

It's called the energy market. Some energy consumers and producers are flexible in when they can produce or consume. So there is some elasticity which buffers the transient nature of wind and solar even without any storage even though there is some.

Nota bene "and other means". This may include other fossil fuels, even other sources of natural gas in the meantime. Which are still easier to get rid of mid-term than nuclear power.

Nuclear power in Germany is not going to happen. We don't like the risk profile, both financially and otherwise. Other nations may see it differently.

Where do you think the fuel for the reactors will come from?

There are lots of uranium reserves around the world that are in classically Western countries

Well not Russia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...

And who do you think has a huge influence over Kazakhstan (and recently helped them prevent a coup).

If one's goal is influence, fighting wars is counter-productive.

The top five countries investing the most into the economy of Kazakhstan remained unchanged in 2019. Being the largest investor, the Netherlands invested $7.3 billion in Kazakhstan (30.2%), followed by the USA — $5.5 billion (23.0%) and Switzerland — $ 2.2 billion. China outran the Russian Federation in terms of investments and took 4th place with $1.7 billion (7.0%), while the Russian Federation closed the top five with $1.4 billion (5.8%) invested in Kazakhstan.

Source: https://www.timesca.com/index.php/news/22338-kazakhstan-attr...

Russia can't get their act together to keep their trucks running. Due to chronic economic malaise and instability, they're not going to be a reliable producer of that fuel for a while.

Up until 1990 we used to mine Uranium in Germany [1]. There's still an expected 74000t left, we're just currently not interested in mining it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wismut_(company)

Uranium, being so energy dense, is quite practical to ship from anywhere in the world, and there are stable and democratic countries with ample reserves - so please don't use such a lazy argument here.

If they did, Putin would cheer. It takes 20 years to build a nuclear plant, so the likely result world be that Germany would be "temporarily" dependent on Russian gas for another 20 years.

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