Two days ago the German government voted to to shut off the three remaining nuclear power plants. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/klima-nachhaltigkeit/...
The decision to shut them down happened long ago. They voted against a proposal from the opposition to revert that. The plants were planned to shut down since a long time, there is a lot of unsolved issues around keeping them running, like fuel and personnel. The plants also would impact gas usage only by 1% and electricity isn't a great replacement short term for all the gas used.
In hindsight I think the decision to get out of nuclear was wrong, especially before getting out of coal. But keeping the last 3 running for some more months isn't really a solution for anything.
It's irrational that Germany is shutting down secure and climate friendly power plants while Europe is in the midst of an energy crises and a war.
The reason for the irrationality is that Germans (I'm one) do not want to admit that they've been wrong about nuclear energy for decades.
In retrospect it would be better if Germany did not decide to shutdown the nuclear, but presently this is a rational decision.
Yes they were, France uses around 40% electrical heating[1], Germany around 5%. Norway is almost entirely electrically heated.
1. From some quick online searching.
But look at France's portion of nuclear at the start of the 70s, then the 90s. There's no reason except political will that Germany couldn't do the same.
If you look at any longer term projections on the German or EU energy mix in the next 10-30 years, natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
The current plans for doing that are fundamentally still those spearheaded by Germany and others before 2014. If the EU has a serious commitment to longer term sanctions on Russia those plans need to change.
I don't think they will. I think we'll still be buying Russian gas then, and that Germany et al will find some way to sell out Ukraine in the next couple of years. But one can always hope for better.
1. https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/the-energy-futur...
> natural gas will still be critical to the energy mix in 2050 if current plans continue. E.g. [1] shows a nice summary of that.
Being critical and being a large component are two different things -- and it's not that difficult to source smaller amounts of natural gas than what Germany uses today. As far as predictions for distant future are concerned...well, we know how e.g. IEA was able to botch those. So I really wouldn't take any predictions about 2050 for granted.
> Thus arguments like "efficient building codes" are a red herring. You'll still need to heat your efficiently insulated buildings.
Decreasing the energy required by a factor of five or so is not "a red herring". That's a massive change. Likewise, there's apparently a chance that by 2030, this will have been amended to require zero-energy buildings in the future.
If by "mitigate" you mean "make less painful", then indeed it is enough, as it's a step in the right direction.
A German produces almost twice as much CO2 as a Frenchmen. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-pe...
No, nobody will admit to that or change their minds, the end of nuclear in Germany will be celebrated as a success for the environment.
No, changing the opinion now would not matter. Germany killed its nuclear industry decades ago. Being right about this would have mattered in the 80s and 90s. You don't get the CO2 or methane that has been emitted back into the ground or the people that died out of the ground by being right in 2022.
That is under dispute. Its the entire reason they are shut down in the first place.
A lot of Germans believe (rightly or wrongly) that Japanese are as quality-conscious and dependable as they themselves. Corollary: if the Japanese can fuck up in the ways that led to Fukushima, then the German operators can fuck up in similar ways.
Now, these people may be wrong. But they made the decision. Until Fukushima, there was a net pro-nuclear vote, after, against, because these people switched.
If you want to argue about safety, I think you might do well do focus on the safety issue that made the significant voter segment change their opinion.
No, they're not. The shutdown decision was made (and put into binding law!) almost ten years before Fukushima.
Mine is that the decision to stop was taken by a government with a parliamentary majority in general, but narrow popular backing in this specific case. So the law at risk of revision if the right/wrong parties won an election. Some politicians thought revising it might be a good campaign issue.
The reacter lifetimes were extended after such an election, and I think it was a first step. If that had gone well, one of the parties in the coalition would've proposed revising the law before the next election. But it did not go well: "Fukushima ändert alles", said Merkel, and I think she was right. From that point on, the law aligned well with a broad majority of voters. Noone proposed a revision as a campaign issue after that point.
Those power plants can't be run next winter.
Contracts have been terminated, replacement parts with long lead times haven't been ordered, maintenance windows have been shifted in anticipation of the shutdown. It's possible to write new contracts and order new parts, so they could be back in operation, maybe sometime late in 2023.
But that would still leave them them down precisely in the period that matters most: Next winter.
Sounds like a long list of lame excuses.
The the usual politicians' way of speaking. If there was the political will of having the nuclear power plants works, they would go and find the spare parts in a second. There's no political will (thank you Greens!) so they make up excuses.
Globally a lot of harvests are falling through because of floods and heat waves. Combined with the inflation that's just starting to take off... Paying for life's necessities will be challenging for a lot of employed workers
Because of the cultural stigma associated with radiations (which itself comes from the very real fear of a world-ending nuclear war during the early cold war) most smokers would refused to live around a nuclear accident site, even though it's quickly (after the most radioactive elements, namely iodine, has decayed away) much less dangerous than the cigarette they knowingly smoke all day.
Fun fact: did you know that in Germany alone the area of what has been destroyed by coal mining is comparable in size to the exclusion zone of Fukushima. This is when things go alright with coal: https://nitter.42l.fr/autommen/status/1538496930262704128#m
viewed from space: https://nitter.42l.fr/KetanJ0/status/1383023566766096386#m
A long sustained risk is called "life".
That is way, way longer than we have anything like civilization!
A video I watched recently explaining a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aUODXeAM-k
Yet that is half the reason for the drama. The other half being Fukushima and Chernobyl.
Humans are not rational beings, hence we need to look at where their fear comes from, to find appropriate solutions.
Also (I still don't understand HN's hype for nuclear), let's not forget how often and much the nuclear plants have to stand still because of xyz (e.g. too little cooling water, which was the case in France in the last months).
> Indeed, far from being an indictment of Stasi infiltration of the Greens, Gieseke and Bahr's study is a portrait of a largely failed attempt by the Communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) to co-opt the nascent left-wing party on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
How did a few Stasi cooperators the 1980s Green Party translate into experts recommending Germany's nuclear power plants be shut down in the late 2010s?
https://legacy-assets.eenews.net/open_files/assets/2017/07/0...
https://www.foxnews.com/world/russia-funding-environmental-g...
https://www.newsweek.com/putin-funding-green-groups-discredi...
https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-governme...
https://www.eenews.net/articles/devin-nunes-claims-russia-is...
in comparison how Russia deals with this internally https://www.nirs.org/russia-cracks-down-on-anti-nuclear-move...
"Seemingly" doesn't really do it for me, especially not when there is a concerted, well financed effort to pull the wool over your eyes.
So sure, in a year or two we can get these reactors back online. In 10 or 15 years we can even get new ones. But these time scales don't help in the next winter and on those time scales we can come up with solutions that are even better and not at risk at making eating shrooms you find in the forest killing you..
Recently a former conservative minister got an award for fighting against wind power which is named after a former key figure of the early green movement in Germany, wo later dropped out to figth against wind turbines.
Bavaria is holding back the construction of a crucial north-south connection for electricity, which would bring the power from the wind-rich north to them. But they don't want the power lines messing up their landscape.
Everyone wants electricity, nobody wants to see the infrastructure that makes it.
People are meshugge.
If they would be easy to run longer, I would be all for it. But big money is better spent into reducing the gas dependency overall.
The decision to keep these 3 plants running or not is not about the waste, but about the fact that they were planned to shut down for years now, and there is some real hurdles to reversing that now. The impact of keeping them on is also rather small. The effort and money is more effectively spent elsewhere.
2. As a consequence, the plants are in no shape to be run much longer without major refurbishment, rehinring and training personal. Also, the fuel rods are basically spent, new ones would have to be ordered and manufactured which takes quite some time. Want to guess where most fuel rods came from? (spoiler: Russia)
3. Yes, running them longer would have saved burning some coal which would be good for the climate.
4. They wouldn't have saved much, if any, gas burning. Gas power plants are "fast" plants, vs. nuclear plants, which are the slowest to change power output. Nuclear power plants consequently cannot replace gas power plants. On top of that, there are a lot of combined electricity/heating gas plants. They cannot be replaced by nuclear power either.
5. Electricity production is just a small fraction of gas usage, the biggest part goes to private home heating and of course, industrial usage.
So, yes, bad timing. Woulnd't have been a problem but for Putin attacking and utterly destroying parts of the Ukraine. But as things are, the best way to deal with is, to press forward with renewables instead of sinking more money into nuclear. (By the way, the real crisis is that only 50% of France nuclear powerplants are operating. Between heat and repairs, French power supply is under much greater pressure, actually often enough supported by Germany)
Can you back that up? To me it looks like only 5% of uranium is in Russia (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/uranium-p...)
> They wouldn't have saved much, if any, gas burning
Compare to coal (that seems to be the tradeoff in Germany) nuclear energy kills 820x more people per produced energy unit. 820x the number of human lives lost.
C02 emissions are about 250x higher https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#:~:text=....
And yes, the nuclear power plants produce less CO2 than coal. No doubt about that. But that is the consequence of a decision over 10 years ago. Unfortunately, the same government who decided that, didn't built up renewables at the required speed, actually slowed down the buildup of renewables.
This is going to change now rapidly.
It's not about mining. You need to enrich uranium first, and a massive portion of world's industrial capacity for that is in Russia: https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/re... - "Russia had around a 46 percent share of global enrichment capacity in 2018".
Also, since the origin of the electricity doesn't matter in this case, to say that you'd need to not shut down those nuclear plants is clearly wrong since you could just use the currently underutilized coal plants to get exactly the same effect -- except the lack of electricity is clearly not a problem.
Yes, long term we can talk about many alternatives, but it's july... august, september, and it's already cold, space heaters cost ~10eur (2kW) and are still available (atleast more available than the alternatives).
France is still paying MWh at far higher price than Germany now (see https://www.eex.com/en/market-data/power/futures#%7B%22snipp...). This may change with Russia closing the Nord Stream 1 but you can't say nuclear energy is the solution.