Germany to Rethink Nuclear Shutdown as Energy Crisis Deepens
climatechangedispatch.com
climatechangedispatch.com
https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
Is this the inflection point when we go back to the 1970s? Richard Nixon had planned for 1000 nuclear reactors in the US for Project Independence by the year 2000:
EDIT: Whoa, people surprisingly hate this comment. It's true though -- rural red counties have been hit much harder, due to demographic factors, lower vaccine uptake as well as boosting, lower access, and lower testing generally (leading to higher serology rate differentials to reported counts). The entire state of GA, for example, looks like each county has low case counts compared to the rest of the US until you realize testing there only captures 1 in 4 cases. This selective intransigence to public health measures was a problem when there was one case, and has persisted to be a problem until today.
Well, yeah. New Zealand had great policies and good compliance.
Then the same shitty murdoch and facebook led conspiracy theories, selfishness, and lies spread. Now they're dealing with the same issues as everyone else. Plus without the insane propaganda machine, lack of aid, and hoarding of unused vaccines we may not have even developed some of the mutations or had it become endemic in animal populations.
At least people in new zealand had a chance to get fully vaccinated there and avoid the short term death toll though.
>> COVID-19 vaccines, which could have prevented endemic establishment in the US of COVID-19 had the GOP base adopted them quicker _(along with non-pharmaceutical interventions)_.
No one gets those diseases [because of vaccines, unstated and ignored] and so there's no point inflicting the unspeakable horror of an innoculation on your precious precious baby... is the reasoning.
My first wife was in this camp.
The issue came in forcing vs persuading.
Also people who got Covid before vaccine were totally ignored and let in an awkward position of being demonized for a vaccine that is to late.
And his political opponents were actively undermining trust in the vaccines at that time.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/563771-guess-who-und...
Seems like even people here have latched onto this partisan merry-go-round.
I’ve literally seen folks push back against Tetanus, Polio, MMR, etc.
edit to add: things like HPV seem harmless, but HPV infection is linked to the vast majority of cervical cancer. Things like epstein-barr are implicated in certain cancers as well.
There are no "good viruses" and just because they have mild initial symptoms does not make them harmless.
I think if adults were catching a disease that took them out of action for a week in a fairly miserable way and gave them blisters that frequently ended up leaving permanent scars, we'd be taking it way more seriously. Kids don't make the decisions, and everyone remembers that they suffered through it, so kids these days should too...
I didn’t even know what foot and mouth disease even was until I saw the big ‘known exposure’ warning, and based on my youngest (for reasons out of my control) getting COVID 4 different independent times since May 2021, only one of which was a known exposure, I know there have been a lot more.
Vaccinating against the known badness just helps reduce the pain and risks of serious problems. It should be a nobrainer.
Near as I can tell however, a lot of moms and some dads can’t stand the idea of giving their kid a jab (as in, the experience of it), and use the excuse of vaccines bad to justify not doing it. Short sighted and surprising common now.
Mumps can occasionally cause fertility issues in males, among other issues, and is quite painful but rarely fatal (approx. .03-.05%).
Shingles is terrible for adults, and you can’t avoid the risk of you got the live virus. If you’re vaccinated before being exposed, I believe the risk is much much lower but I don’t have the numbers handy.
The most trustworthy data sources I could find points at about .02% for measles and .03% for covid. Then of course, infection fatality rate is notoriously hard to quantify.
Every single case hides a personal tragedy.
Different numbers of course, but not that far off -
Measles case fatality rate of 1.2% in unvaccinated population (and they tested everyone nearby, so CFR should be very near IFR here) [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8483622/]. The .02% is way too low except in perhaps already vaccinated population.
US deaths by COVID-19 are now just over 1 million. I’ve heard plenty of anecdotal stories of over and under counting, but given current US population of 329 million, and widespread vaccination, the early stage 1%ish fatality rate is about right. It couldn’t be .03% except perhaps in already vaccinated folks, otherwise we’d literally not have had a pandemic. Total fatalities with a 100% infection rate and no vaccination would be less than 100k. More than that die from normal flus and colds every year, and the excess fatality numbers make it clear that isn’t what happened.
But in the end, just the price will kill them on any larger scale.
Fukushima is a good example of this, because the massive amount of paperwork made it hard to see that they could just spend 1/10th the amount of time, energy, and money and better protect their cooling generators and/or ask for help in time from the navy that was sitting just offshore and willing to help
Yes. My idea is that it would be much less harm (to human health and the environment) than is caused by burning brown coal in properly functioning coal-burning power plants.
And much less harm than results from using diesel as a transport fuel. That produces very high levels of carcinogens and other harmful products.
Yet, Europe does both.
Edit: note that these harms are caused every day by equipment working as designed. They are not due to extreme unforeseen circumstances but are accepted as normal.
It is a shame it was unable to prevent green-lighting Vogtle and the other disaster next door.
Depends, what type of plant?
Plenty of nuclear plant designs that just drop the rods into a water bath and halt all activity.
Do you realize what types of health impacts gas leaks are having on densely populated regions right now?
Or how about fracking destroying drinking water? Higher cancer and birth defect rates for surrounding communities.
> How close Japan brush with disaster as the Fukushima fallout could have hit the Tokyo region?
The amount of fallout from Fukushima was obscenely minuscule. The worst case estimates, by the most pessimistic naysayers, 130 extra deaths will result from the accident. The most commonly agreed upon estimates, 0 additional deaths.
Meanwhile, 13k people dead minimum from coal in America each year. No one even tracks the impact from the literal thousands of natural gas leaks that are ongoing. [1] is a nice visualization of natural gas incidents from 2010 to 2017.
Fukushima was a worst case scenario with massive mismanagement on multiple levels, and the sum environmental impact was less than any of the multiple of oil tanker spills that happen, quite literally, multiple times a year. [2]
[1] https://public.tableau.com/views/NaturalGasTransmissionIncid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oil_spills
Also: Germans love their safety regulations, this is never going to happen.
Reactors don’t generate a lot of waste by volume, and it gets less of a problem over time by it’s very nature.
Also: uranium is a finite resource. After it will have run out, it humanity will have to maintain and check these storage sites for that amount of time. Who is expected to pay this? People who don't profit from the power anymore? In my eyes the only solution is either transmutation into less harmful wastes (very costly) or paying the future storage cost for that timeframe upfront (very, very costly).
1) In far less than a million years, the contents of the cask will be well below background radiation levels. Literally less dangerous from radiation than sitting at home.
2) It’s been less than 100 years since Germany had a raving lunatic trying to conquer the world at the helm, and less than 50 since they were split in half between two world superpowers. It’s ridiculous hubris to think anyone could predict or plan more than 100 years in advance with any certainty, let alone a million. And by setting a million year milestone, they’re saying ‘don’t even try to make something that could work now’
3) more people will die from the economic fallout of what the gov’t is doing (and the burning of Coal, wars, etc) than would die from any halfway likely outcome of a nuclear disaster here. They could have multiple Fukushima’s and still be better off.
4) as a species, anything recognizably human has been around AT MOST a single digit multiple of that number. Recorded history and civilization is a tiny fraction of that number. It’s a fun mental game, not a pragmatic limit or has any real meaning in this context.
Also, while Uranium is finite (as is everything else), we’ve got plenty to last the foreseeable future even without any fancy technology advancements. And there is plenty of avenues for that.
It’s the picture of ‘the now is unacceptable, the future is impossible.’
heck even a time scale of 10.000 is beyoned the current civilized world, do you even realize that? how stupid to talk even about millions, if the modern world didn't even exists for a few HUNDRED of years.
and it's stupid to dump shit into the earth without knowing what will happen at point x.
I’m saying ‘don’t set some impossible to achieve goal and fall into analysis paralysis while doing things with far worse known outcomes right now’. Because that is also dumb.
We know putting it in giant steel casks is pretty much foolproof, and will ensure no leaks for at least 40+ years. They’re literally bulletproof. It’s what every major reactor has been doing for 40+ years. Works surprisingly well.
It is an absolute mystery why this does not inspire utmost confidence in the future of safe nuke waste storage...
And yeah, Putin did send folks who did dig parts of it up - and play in it. They are idiots. They might die from it. However, conservatively, at least 10,000-100,000x the number of people already have, or will shortly be dead from more classical methods - artillery, gunfire, incendiaries, etc. Horrible ways to go, all. Near as I can tell, the idiots doing the digging are also likely to be the only ones seriously impacted by it, unlike the others.
Nuclear waste isn’t super healthy or anything, but it’s not even on the radar of ‘nasty shit a maniacal dictator will use to kill people’. Except maybe a bond-type spy ironically.
You know the last Hitler literally had his folks invent ICBMs and setup mass death camps, right?
Even if all the nuclear waste in the world right now went back in time and got spilled in the worst places possible, the mess and ensuing death would be way less than they made.
If it’s entombed in glass or in giant steel casks requiring no further work to keep safe, then the only real danger would be them pulling it out and using it for evil. Which, they’ll already have plenty of evil things at their disposal, and things far easier to use and more scalable for evil too. So not likely to be all that interesting.
Plus security. You need to keep people out- there's always going to be some idiot who wants to get too close or use it for Evil.
That said, I imagine the costs are far less than the alternatives. Rebuilding the grid to satisfy continental-wide wind will produce a lot of CO2.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[46] [...] Eventually, more than 120 reactor orders were cancelled,[50] and the construction of new reactors ground to a halt.
> The failure of the U.S. nuclear power program ranks as the largest managerial disaster in business history, a disaster on a monumental scale … only the blind, or the biased, can now think that the money has been well spent. It is a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.[53]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_United_St...
> In November 2012 it was discovered that over 5,000 small components used in five reactors at Yeonggwang Nuclear Power Plant had not been properly certified; eight suppliers had faked 60 warranties for the parts. Two reactors were shut down for component replacement, which was likely to cause power shortages in South Korea during the winter.[24] Reuters reported this as South Korea's worst nuclear crisis, highlighting a lack of transparency on nuclear safety and the dual roles of South Korea's nuclear regulators on supervision and promotion.[25] This incident followed the prosecution of five senior engineers for the coverup of a serious loss of power and cooling incident at Kori Nuclear Power Plant, which was subsequently graded at INES level 2.[24][26]
> In 2013, there was a scandal involving the use of counterfeit parts in nuclear plants and faked quality assurance certificates. In June 2013 Kori 2 and Shin Wolsong 1 were shut down, and Kori 1 and Shin Wolsong 2 ordered to remain offline, until safety-related control cabling with forged safety certificates is replaced.[27] Control cabling in the first APR-1400s under construction had to be replaced delaying construction by up to a year.[28] In October 2013 about 100 people were indicted for falsifying safety documents, including a former chief executive of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power and a vice-president of Korea Electric Power Corporation.[29]
Ever since local NY authorities prevented a distant completed reactor from ever being operated by refusing to write a regulation-mandated evacuation plan, it's been mostly impossible to build nuclear in the US. Why put lots of capital at risk when rules might change and it can be decided "ehhhh, nevermind, you can't operate!" at the end of the process years later.
1 - all powerplants should be identical, so you can work out problems on reactor 1 and have no probpems by the time you are building reactor 55. The US model of private companies building random shit doesnt fit well. Thats how wind and solar work - they build thousands of identical solar panels and wind turbines
2 - you cant start and stop construction - if you stopped building for 10 years, your engineers have left, retired or died. Now you build a new reactor, and you are goong to have inexperienced people making the same mistakes. you have to have an institution that is building non-stop for 20 years, like china does.
thats also why wind and solar works - the same teams of people were installing and servicing turbined for decades
3 - factory made - manufacturing of wind and solar is automated to a large degree. Automation in construction is ~0%. Whether you are building a house or a reactor, they are expensive manual labour. Some of this might be solved with prefab buildings, some might be solved with Small Moduper reactors, but approached require large investment and long-term commitment
Yes, solar and wind will need to be accompanied by lets call them "on-demand" power sources, like gas, water, in the future large-scale storage and of course power2gas for entirely renewal gas production.
By the way, the "base load" was artificially increased in the past to accommodate the mainly slow power plants. This is no longer a requirement, future loads will be more dynamic and more adjusted to the market offers.
So you always have to have some means of power generation available for demand raises at any point and you have to be able to throttle down power generation in case of a demand drop, because otherwise the grid goes down equally as if you had not enough power capacity.
The good news is: renewables can be throttled down quickly, better than most other sources, the bad news is, you can only know about 3 days in advance what the maximum output of your renewables will be and there are days with very low total production. A future grid concept would have to come up with a solution for that. Gas would have been the easy way and probably will be the future when based on gas created via power2gas.
This is an incredible misunderstanding! Honestly, it's like saying that planet Earth is flat.
Did you meant something like "time zones are a social construct"? This true but quite a different claim that the one you made (which is not surprising since what you said is just nonsense).
Conclusion: we need nuclear (and most certainly we don’t need gas).
And before the inevitable comment follows, yes, that may change with future technology. Just like everything else.
In your scenario where we use renewables + gas, water, and storage which of these would be ensuring that we at least have enough to satisfy the loads on the grid that never turn off or vary? Everything on that list except gas is subject to forces we cannot directly control so I assume you would need a certain number of gas power plants to always be in production or idling to satisfy that demand.
Thirdly, why the preference for gas over nuclear?
The big problem with nuclear from the grid side is, that they are the slowest power plants available. Consequently, (and because of cost efficiency) they are run at high power output levels 24/7, the rest of the grid has to adjust by being throttled or fast plants which can be ramped up and down.
Gas is the fastest type of classical power plants (together with water, but that usually has limited amounts). And as the fuel always was on the expensive side, there is quite an incentive of not running gas power plants too much. They would be a good company to renewables, as they can switch between 0 and 100% and back very quickly. And in a grid dominated by renewables, you would only rarely run them at high loads for longer times. And while they emit more CO2 than nuclear plants, they do distinctively less than coal powered plans.
In the long run, you can run gas plants on e.g. hydrogen produced from solar - the recent plans for extending gas power plants in Germany all included the requirement to be usable with hydrogen too.
> [...]
> According to National Grid plc chief executive officer Steve Holliday and others, baseload is "outdated".[7][6]
Great, so what do we do when the sun isn't shining, the wind isn't blowing and the dams are empty? Just have a second grid worth of gas plants which we turn on once every two weeks for shits and giggles?
In fact this isn't going to happen and there needs to be enough fungible capacity both internally and in the European grid. Right now, France is highly dependent on the grid, as 50% of the nuclear plants are down.
What if it just requires keeping the existing plants around, and turning them on for 6 hours every 8 weeks, for example?
Yes, that's not 100% renewable, but it gets electricity production to 99% renewable, and that other 1% you can mitigate by doing power-to-gas / direct-air-capture.
Australia is right now fairly close to finishing a 350GWh battery for about $6 billion.
By contrast, Hinkley Point C will take about 20 years to finish, and pump out 3.2GW at a cost of about $20 billion.
No nuke anywhere was ever fully commercial. In every case they depend on heavy public subsidy.
All solved issues - nuclear energy is a matter of political will at this point.
As it is, even with that subsidy financing plants is basically impossible without more subsidies. Bill Gates' new reactor startup required taxpayers to fund 50% of it to even exist.
In terms of priorities it doesn't make any sense at all to me though. It's hard to get the global population to care and act about what the GLOBAL state of the planet will be by the end of the century. So I really could not care less if by accident a few people dug a hole in tens of thousand of years at the wrong place and it created an issue. It's not like the whole human population would meet at this same spot and quickly dig a hole deep enough together so that they all get radiated...
Also, if you do decide to leave a message anyway, you'll just have to make it interpretable to a human, not to any possible "creature". 10 000 years is nothing on evolutionary time scales, so it will still just be us humans around, (or nobody at all, if we happen to go extinct first).
Anyway let's address the comment:
> all currently available nuclear reactor models are way more expensive to build than renewables
Okay you use all, a universal quantifier which is epistemologically very weak. For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies. The interest rate is a self-fullifling prophethy and most of nuclear reactors have been created pre-bureaucratic era, are still in use and are actually much less deadly than C02 air pollution so let's admit the talking point is ad-hoc mediocrity. Secondly even if you take into account the economics of nuclear reactors from countries that have abandoned nuclear.. you have to realize how absurd the comparison is:
1) renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason
2) solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency, compare that with the lifepsan of 80-90 years that nuclear often attain and you see that the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
3) Essentially it's time to try to avoid making absurd statements. Solar and wind economics are absurd, inexistant once you necessitate a storage grid (e.g. no light at night or with mild weather) and this which is barely doable (still no single real world deployment of a smart grid fully renewable (without cheats like hydro) exists) and has absurd economics (not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind). 3) just show how strong the level of virtue signaling/hypocrisy going on.
4) actually if your country hasn't become crazy you can have nuclear that are more economical even without considering 3), which is likely the case of China but most evidently is the case of Russia, which like it or not is the world leader by far, the new VVER-TOI are disruptive, both in economics and time to build (3.5 years), while simultaneously improving upon safety.
> where to get and reprocess fuel rods
this is not an issue
> What about operational safety
well if you're not retarded enough to build a plant in a major seismic/tsunami region the operational safety is much superior to all other classses of energies. Renewable induce more deaths than nuclear.
> where to dump the radiactive waste
You are talking about a fiction, in france nuclear generate a few kilos of waste per habitant, per year. The majority of nuclear wastes do not come from the nuclear industry and are a non issue since we have many depositories in place and the vast majority become negligibly radioactive after a few years. About the long term part while its very easy to isolate like many kinds of equally or more toxic industrial wastes, it can be reprocessed as MOX fuel however it is slighly less economical but only of a few percents.
In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot. If nuclear become the needed pilotable energy it makes renewable economics moot. Hence obviously renewable use will be very limited. Also I foresee that the russian nuclear export monopoly will massively grow although china might take a slice and so could Korea and France iff France new EPR pragmatic design is not a shitshow.
One thing I am wary about is what the lifespan of any newly build plant would be that uses modern technology.
If you take a random 8bit home computer from 1983, all the non-mechanical parts on it likely still work today.
If you take a random computer from 1993, well most bits probably work.
If you take a random computer from 2003, if you are lucky some things work.
2013? Odds are it won't work.
The differences in manufacturing between everyday consumer electronics and high reliability electronics has grown larger and larger, for two reasons.
One is progress of Moore's law, smaller feature sizes have made electronics more susceptible to many different types of failure[1][2].
The second is RoHS[3], removing lead from solder has basically given all consumer electronics a 10 year life span.
Now of course you can get non-RoHS components, but they are not the norm, and to make things reliable you need to ensure everything is not RoHS.
Want a reliable storage medium? That is going to cost an insane multiple. Want a reliable computer? Another insane multiple, you are going to need to have something built on an ancient manufacturing process, and because you aren't getting the benefits of economies of scale you are paying more, and you are basically getting a bespoke machine so you now need to test it to heck and back to ensure reliability.
One problem with how we have chosen to advance our electronics industry is that the types of goods that are made en-masse have steadily separated from what types of goods need to be made for long term engineering projects.
An example of this in action: when Tesla first came out they realized existing automotive infotainment systems basically sucked and that they couldn't provide a good UX with anything available off the shelf at the time, so they instead plopped new consumer non-automotive gear. A touch screen that didn't suck! But it also melted. Everyone yelled at them "should have known better!" but their choices were "unreliable consumer" or "crappy behind the scenes".
Another example, RoHS doesn't have exclusions for home appliances. RoHS is also why the control board on washing machines gives out after ~10 years, necessitating purchasing a new washing machine even though the mechanics may have another decade left in them! (RoHS needs a crap ton more exclusions for long lived appliances...)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_(semiconductor)#Fa... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromigration [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...
It's just a function of cost, do you want to engineer your device/machine to last or not, and are more features more important to you than reliability.
YouTube recently recommended me some tear down videos of washing machines, for whatever reason. The video compared 1990s to modern machines.
The insides are remarkably similar, the main failure point is the electronics, flat out.
And in my experience (n=1), what fails on modern appliances is the electronics! Not the pumps or motors, sure sometimes those go out, but most often it is the control board.
Look at every car built since 2010. Sure you have some models with known manufacturing defects on a given part, but replace that one part and mechanically most cars are reliable. But how many cars have you come across that run just fine, but the check engine light is stuck on and the mechanic is like "well I could fix it but it will cost a lot"?
We have hundreds of years of knowledge about making reliable machines in massive quantities, and then cost reducing them (ok maybe 200 years tops), as a species we haven't even bothered trying to cost reduce reliable electronics! We just accept that they will fail.
People absolutely can build reliable electronics these days, but it will be slightly more expensive than not quite so reliable electronics. Higher profit margin has a higher priority than making sure the product survives long after the warranty period has ended. Especially if the consumer only looks at the initial price without taking into consideration how long it will last. Which is also hard to do without reviewers tearing the machine to bits. Being expensive does not mean it is actually any good and will last a long time.
I guess that's because you are missing part of the picture.
> For starters the economical costs are accidental bureaucratic contingencies.
Yes, everything says that it's possible to create safer nuclear reactors. But our current ones aren't. Safe reactors are on the same level of "nobody does this because of market and bureaucratic constraints" as cheap open-storage fuel cells. Except that the constraints are harder to change for the reactors.
We should be trying very hard to change both. But until we do, the reality will be that both nuclear reactors and batteries are expensive. And our current reactors are only safe because of the safeguards put on them, remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore.
> renewable is increasing the cost of nuclear operation (underusage of maximal throughput) for nor reason
That's a pretty bad way to frame it. The problem here is that all non-dipatchable (on the economical sense, not the technical one) sources compete to get full utilization. That's not a problem when most of the power is dispatchable, but none of the options you are considering (renewables - except for buifuels - or nuclear) are. Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).
The only solution here is storage.
> solar panel have a short lifespan (20-30 years) with diminishing returns of efficiency ... the cost that people usually refer for solar panel must be doubled.
You noticed that you took the manufacturer guarantee and cited it as expected lifetime, right? AFAIK, we don't have a good number for how long our current tech of solar panels will last, because after just a few decades on the field, nobody catalogued enough failures to measure it. But we know it's way longer than that.
Anyway, doubling the cost of solar panels is both the wrong way to go (interest rates exist), and changes about nothing when comparing with the current costs of nuclear. (It would make them lose to coal, but then, both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs.)
> Solar and wind economics are absurd
Well, you clearly didn't dig into those. Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries). But it will of course always lose to natural gas generation.
Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap.
> not even talking about the immense stress that would have on lithium resources which are seriously needed for the future of mankind
I don't expect grid storage to use lithium at all, but the fact that you have gone over lithium¹ reserves and are ignoring uranium reserves shows a very biased research. TLDR, none will be a problem soon (or probably ever for lithium).
> In the end, once renewable reach a major percentage of energy and heat production, the use of gaz and fuel as pilotable energies will skyrocket making the point moot.
Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.
But anyway, renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way, so the only way they can push the prices higher is by reducing economies of scale, what is actually the goal.
1 - Of any element you could choose, you decided to go with lithium, one of the most available ones on the Earth's surface? But well, once in a while somebody pops up talking about iron or silicon shortages, so you could have done worse.
1) extraordinary claim 2) completely miss the point that the 10000 bureaucratic safety rules could be trimed by half while actually improving security and reducing costs. 3) completely miss the point that current models from Russia and China are cost effective and comply with aforementioned unoptimized rules.
> remove the safeguards, and they won't be safe anymore
most of the reactors from the 70s and 80s are still in use. they have much less safeguards and are still safe enough as in you'd better invest the saved money in saving lifes/medecine research than in those hypothethical safety gains that only drive marketing and hypocrisy.
> Adding nuclear capacity will increase the nuclear operational cost even more than renewables (because they have the same generation profile).
completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics. completely miss the point that nuclear plants can contrary to renewable decrease their output in a very fine grained way. Why is that interesting? The plant cost almost the same, but does not add a significant cost by overproducing electricity. When renewable overproduce electricity (which happens all the time given enough share) the excess electricity will break the electric grid and cause a nationwide shutdown. To prevent that, the Grid operator has to sell electricity at a loss (AKA pay people to consume the electricity). Given some level this startegy won't even work and will need a special costly infrastructure optimized for burning (throwing away) excess electricity.
> But we know it's way longer than that
who is we? Where is the evidence? Also newer reactors have a lifespan extendable to 100 years hence you need to triple or quadruple the price. And wind, which is generally much more prevalent than solar last in most cases 20 years. In 2016 they have started (in germany) installing twice as big turbines which are likely to have shorter lifespans.
> The only solution here is storage. > Well, eventually we will need storage. That's true for nuclear too.
nuclear doesn't need energy storage.
> Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)
please source, enligthen me, I am unable to find reliable information supporting this.
> Anyway, natural gas generation at night is a pretty good stop-gap
Please let's not be a joke, the discussion is about a long term fossil-free future. Not a thesis that only works until it doesn't.
> grid storage to use lithium at all
wtf, energy storage without batteries is niche. What are you refering to? Water, hydrogen? The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium. This should be obvious.
> renewables don't increase the consumption of fossil fuel based sources in any way
Renewable needs pilotable energies. Solar in january and december is almost non existent. How much is an empirical and country dependent question but bewteen 20-30% average share of fossil energy needed seems probable. Meanwhile 100% nuclear is perfectly doable. 70% renewable 30% nuclear is also doable but would be economically inefficient.
> both solar and coal are normally built by private business with proper accounting in practice to compare their costs
Wrong assumption, solar and wind in germany are extensively subsidized.
Anyway the most salient point about this discussion is the storage energy cost and feasability, of which you provide zero data.
regarding lithium availability: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceDiscussion/comments/q78xv... Enough to build 8 billions cars and then zero cars for the next generation LOL. Now add that in addition of one car per habitant we need a similar or even bigger battery for his regular electricity uses, including house heating.
Doing policies that last for just the current generation and not the next centuries is madness. Yes we've all heard there are HUGE reserves in the oceans. Which pointless to say. There are a looot of gold in the oceans too. The density and extractability of it is the key question. The fact this is not currently used means it cost more than current methods. How much more? x10 ? x100? x10000? Who knows? Sharing technical evidence about this issues would improve the depth of the discussion but until then we are manipulating a huge existential risk.
about uranium reserves: right, the current estimate of reserves is of a 230 year supply at current consumption. The needed consumption for 100% would be at least a x10 so let's say we ran out of uranium in 23 years if massively adopted. 1) A major point is that contrary to lithium, the mining industry of uranium is much smaller and therefore if it received mass funding, the reserves might significantly increase. 2) like lithium there are huge oceanic reserves and like lithium, this is not a solution until proven otherwise. 3) reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption. Note that lithium can be recycled too but setting a global systematic recycling industry is yet to be done. 4) Indeed thorium reactors (not uranium) are the ideal solution since we have thorium for the next millenium. Thoriums reactors are not just a theoretical concepts, some have been made so it is feasable. It has not been developed because the energy efficiency/economics are inferior (how much ?) although since most of the cost is on the time to build the plant anyway, this should still be a viable solution although not necessarily as cost effective as renewable here (but with an expensive energy storage grid and pragmatic designs (like russian/chinese ones) and taking into account lifespan, and renewable need for fossil fuels/gaz, it very well could be) As for the ocean argument it seems easier to solve for uranium though which is needed in much less quantity (because of its ernergy density) and hence needs less regional density. Note however that water filtration methods for lithium are often similar to existing desalinisation plants. Which ironically are a great specialization for nuclear power plants.
So... The claim safeguards created after major accidents happened are necessary for safety is extraordinary?
They can probably be improved, but then, you keep comparing with Russia and China as if those two countries cared about the safety of their population.
(Anyway, there was a recent paper here on HN that looked into the issue and discovered the costs are more of a consequence of the small size of the industry than the safety constraints. That kind of problem is hard to fix, but if you want to try, it's a worthy cause.)
> completely miss the point that not developing renewable and going for 100% nuclear increase overall economics.
You seem willfully ignorant of how power generation economics work. Or are you talking about the opportunity costs of choosing the cheapest option?
>> But we know it's way longer than that
>who is we? Where is the evidence?
Hum... The first Google result I get seems to be using this data:
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/51664.pdf
TLDR, the worst kind of panel they measured lost less than 2% of it's capacity per year, so about half of its capacity in 50 years. Some slightly more expensive ones lost less than 1% per year.
> > Storage seems to be viable even with current tech (not using batteries)
> please source
Oh, there's a comment on this thread about how hydro-storage can hold about 10 times the requirements for the world. There was one recently about how hydrogen is perfectly sufficiently, as flawed as it is. And of curse, there is always some weird design appearing once in a while, that nobody invests in, of course, because nobody has ever invested on energy storage.
> The majority should be with electric batteries AKA lithium.
What a lack of principled thinking, this equating batteries with lithium. Lithium isn't that great for stationary storage in any way other than the batteries factories already existing.
> Renewable needs pilotable energies.
Not more of them than we are using now. Anyway, no, 100% nuclear doesn't work well either, it would be incredibly expensive. None work without storage. (By the way, you seem to have an incorrect model of why renewables don't decrease their production when they overproduce. Most of them can do it perfectly well if the overproduction becomes too severe, it just brings costs.)
> regarding lithium availability
And then we go into the "what is the meaning of that "reserves" word" treadmill... You may want to look into it in detail, as both lithium and uranium have a problem with that word. None has a problem of availability.
Anyway, about sea extraction, people have done it economically for lithium, but for uranium it's many orders of magnitude harder.
Also, about this:
> reactors that reuse MOX fuel (like e.g. France does) can significantly (how much ?) reduce uranium consumption.
In theory, recycling can reduce consumption around 1000 times (varies with every detail on the lifecycle). Breeding can do much more (that's why thorium is interesting).
Overall, breeding reactors are currently way too expensive. They are interesting on the long term, once those solvable problems get solved. I do agree they have no place at all in a discussion about current energy crisis or global warming.
This discussion was already happening before the war in Ukraine, it probably helped both gas and nuclear getting labeled as green though.
-people telling me this 5 years ago
-also people telling me the same 10 years ago
-also people telling me the same 15 years ago
-also people telling me te same 20 years ago
-and of course, people telling me this now.
Never mind that nuclear isnt dispatchable either (ramping down production can be done but it basically just wastes energy) and also needs to be paired with storage or gas to work.
That being said I'm all for not putting all our eggs in the same basket, and having both nuclear, wind, solar AND coal and gas plants is fine by me (but the plan must say that the coal and gas plants will never be in use, but they are ready "just in case")
Try find a windless day here.
Do you have numbers for off-shore parks along the Baltic coast? That would be much more interesting.
We are talking about a continent scale grid.
And what's wrong with idea that we shouldn't freely give other countries leverage on us?
That being said, the article is pretty low on numbers. The only actual number shown is -32% in UK. Which can totally be overcome by having 5x overproduction in whole of Europe.
was presumably the answer to that. Now of course one does need a proper analysis of weather patterns (wind+sun) over the whole of Europe over the long term to know how well it would actually work. But it is a fairly large area.
Yet we build 10GW of capacity, that mostly does not contribute towards lower coal usage.
And, wind capacity factor is usually very low.
I don't mind keeping building solar panels, but subsidizing requires proper analysis of the benefits and externalities (notably on the grid) rather than blindly giving money to anyone saying !SOLAR! like we currently do.
Solar on reservoirs and in pastures will be recognized as an overwhelmingly better idea.
A dollar spent on solar displaces several times as much carbon as anything else except wind, even after accounting for night and weather.
So, like the 8% production two weeks ago, you need a 10x overbuild _just_ to reach rated capacity consistently. And you probably need some kind of long term storage as well for when it really goes bad.
There is a huge difference between slow to dispatch (coal/nuke/etc) plants which take hours to come up to full pressure, and simply not having anything that can come online (solar/wind) for a predicted weather event.
Unless TX has a median load factor of 100% (in which case, wow), 5x overbuilding on top of median load factor definitely works in the case you describe.
As far as I know, the typical wind average load factor is 33%. So over-scaling by 5x of that would mean that 7% is still enough to provide. Granted, that's not a very large margin to the 8% you mention, but Europe is bigger than Texas, so it's less likely to have such a low-wind event.
Here look at whats going on:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/expanded-view/cu...
You will have to tweak the graph because I didn't spend the time to figure out how to create a link to a graph which isolates just wind, and then expands the time-frame out to an entire year.
If you do that, what you see is during the summer the lulls are much lower and last for much longer. AKA it might go for a week or two basically not producing anything. It happens at other times of the year too, but during the spring/fall the weather is changing faster (aka its less stable) and the running average goes up.
This is what the wind/solar people seem to refuse to understand, its not a simple averaged calculation over a year because the worse case is much much worse for storage and capacity. The wind blows at 5% nameplate for two weeks, and the amount of storage and overbuild required to bridge that makes it an order of magnitude more expensive than pretty much every other source. Made massively worse because in say TX, that is also when energy consumption peaks.
But there is a _HUGE_ difference between simply not having the capacity because the wind isn't blowing, and having to predict 12-24 hours in advance what the energy load is going to be. In the latter case its entirely possible to spin a nuke or coal plant up in anticipation of the need.
Plus, if you overbuilt nukes, and could guarantee a consistent energy overproduction then you could build all kinds of energy soaking plants, to say desalinate sea water, produce various liquid fuels, etc as well as drive the acceptance of electric cars with free night/weekend charging schedules.
This is actually one of my issues with the Biden administrations "we need more charging" stations drive recently. Charging stations are a problem that will fix themselves when people can look at electric cars and actually say "i'm not driving a coal burner around" and its a no brainier to charge this thing vs buying gas. Until recently that calculation isn't clear, your playing around the edges with the numbers, and the best cases aren't even 2x. Continent wide off peak free and clean electricity for charging makes it obvious which is better. When that happens gas stations will scramble to install charging.
I think the current median price for a new electric car is something like $67k. Buying used is a bit like taking the gamble of not having health insurance- maybe you'll be fine, maybe you'll get a life-wrecking bill.
OTOH, there are probably various borderline amoral ways to deal with the problem by shifting it somewhere else.
So, while its true a new battery pack costs a small fortune, most of them probably aren't completely useless when they fail. If car packs are anything like power tool packs, old laptop packs, and the like then they generally go "bad" when a cell or two get far enough out of spec that its not safe to charge/discharge them as a pack because the charge controllers aren't fine grained enough to manage each cell individually beyond monitoring. The internet are full of DYI projects where people collected packs with 18650 batteries, tore them out, quantified them, and then rebuilt them into packs with matching cells.
I'm betting this holds true even for car packs not using a battery standard like the 18650s. Given a pile of back packs, they could be torn apart, the cells rematched, and then rebuilt into remanufactured packs. Sure they won't be 120% or whatever over their original capacity like the new ones, but a battery pack with 85% of its capacity sold for 1/8th of the price of a new one will likely have a market.
BTW: Couple years ago when I was in yellowstone, Toyota had a big plaque on one of the visitor centers about how they were reusing prius batteries for solar backup.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1098326_used-toyota-hyb...
So, even when they are at 50%/etc of their capacity they have a use in stationary applications.
I suspect this will continue to be true for any used EV whose MSRP (i.e. brand new price) is under $30k. If true, then EVs are the vehicle equivalent of single-use plastics.
It seems like you think that no wind or wind comes as a complete surprise and that they don't use models to estimate the wind for the next day? How do you think the day-ahead prices are calculated? 1GW missing is 1GW missing, it doesn't matter if that's wind or nuclear. That mismatch needs to be accounted for.
And they can and do, tell traditional plants they can't go down for maintenance, or that they have to come back online.
The solar/wind numbers aren't even remotely comparable at this point because no one factors those in until the power bill shows up, then somehow the price goes up as we add more "cheap" renewables.
And those nukes are going to look downright inexpensive if/when we ever get the point of consuming more than say 2/3'rds of the yearly power from wind/solar.
So, keep wishing for that magic renewable bullet and keep watching the gobal CO2 increase and getting pushback from people who aren't happy about rolling blackouts, or their energy prices going up and up and up.
If the greenheads got out of the way and stopped trying to kill every nuke plant the engineering and construction prices would fall significantly. Its not like they are actually that hard to build, we did it in the past, and places that aren't Europe and the US somehow manage to do it for significantly less too. AKA, the price is a political problem not a technical one.
The money handed over to the contractor for the nuke, meanwhile, could have instead built out several more matching solar and wind farms, that would also come online in just a year or two, displacing that many times more CO2 emission.
So, each nuke plant started, diverting money from building out renewables, brings climate catastrophe nearer. Coal interests are lobbying now for nuke projects, because it means a continuing market for coal while they are built, vs. wind and solar that displace coal market share immediately.
Even nuke prices outside of the US and Europe are barely more expensive these days than the cost of wind and a gas plant, making them actually less expensive when the gas plant fuel costs are factored in over its lifespan.
Spend some time with: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=nuclear+construction+prices...
For starters lets look at: https://www.vox.com/2016/2/29/11132930/nuclear-power-costs-u...
which has such wonderful nuggets as: "A breakthrough came in 1963 with GE's contract to build a low-cost light-water reactor at Oyster Creek, New Jersey. By the late 1960s, overnight construction costs for new reactors had dropped to $600 to $900/kW in today's dollars — cheaper than modern gas plants. Atomic energy was on a roll."
The cost is basically bullcrap, even now, if you look at the prices for American and French companies to build plants in China sure its more than a wind farm, but actually about the same per KW when you factor in the gas plant needed to backup that wind farm, nevermind solar...
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...
And those are basically one off, if you think the Chinese are going to be paying those premiums for their own home grown designs I think your probably missing the past 25 years or so of Chinese economic theory, which is summarized as learn how to build it utilizing foreign companies, frequently at great cost, build a few experimental copies/etc and then start stamping out home grown designs for a fraction of the cost. That is after all why your solar panels are so inexpensive. At least where I'm at though, the price of solar hasn't really declined much over the past 15 years or so, because the labor costs now account for probably 2/3th+ of the installed system costs. Going from a $1.50 a W panels to $.60 panels while the install cost climbs at a faster rate hasn't been a winning combination.
We already have gas plants, and would anyway need them regardless, so including them in the cost of the renewables is special pleading.
These tricks do not fool anybody. Shame on you.
2. they follow the load but they also pump out unnecessary energy (heat) into the ocean (you can't do that with normal reactors, BECAUSE you don't have infinite cooling water)
3. it's way smaller and the load is way smaller < 100 MW which of course makes load following way way more easier
The fact that sometimes energy needs to be dumped != system cannot be throttled. And a huge number of nuke plants are already on the coast so, they have just as much water as a sub (not that this really matters).
And I suspect size isn't really a factor here, its more about time variance, which I suspect is higher on a ship than its is on the grid. The grid wouldn't be swinging its power usage as drastically or completely as one would expect from propulsion onboard a ship.
This is more about whether its possible to run the reactor at say 50% rated capacity for long periods of time, which AFAIK naval reactors can do, and to a certain extent so can some civilian plants, rod placement controls not just criticality but in the end heat generation, which translates to power output.
During the shortages two weeks ago the wind farms were producing at 8% of rated capacity, and that isn't an unusual amount for this time of year. The wind farms do fantastic in the spring/fall when we don't need much energy, but then in the winter and summer they are frequently less than 15% of rated capacity.
Puting just wind and sun infrastructure means constant blackouts.
All political decisions in western democracies have a hard limit of a four year time horizon. Sure, there are times when collective decisions can be made with decades of planning - but only if they can fall through the increasingly narrow gaps between left/right politics.
Don't get me wrong, it's still better than any alternative I've seen anywhere, but it has its weaknesses.
5 years in the UK, though it's been a long time since there was a change in power between parties without a 10+ year stint in office first.
The last year you don’t want to piss off the voters so you have to be very sparse in getting anything done, so the last year in the election run up is spent pandering to as many people as possible rather than actually doing any of the real work.
Even if in the end you get multiple terms in office, you were never guaranteed re-election, so you were forced to make short term plans regardless (to stop the other lot getting in instead).
Not sure I follow your point.
Elections happen every X years whether you win them or not. The job of a politician is to pander to the electorate, not take action.
The second best is today.
How about imprisoning the responsible for the exceeded budget?
How does Microsoft/Walmart deal with someone promising a thing will cost X but then costs 4X?
That is why SMR will not find traction.
People only really started abandoning nuclear power with the advent of fukushima.
While solar and wind have advanced quite a bit to the point that they're a viable option in many regions, whether or not nuclear is at least on the table is the litmus test for whether someone actually takes climate change seriously. Anyone who dogmatically rules out nuclear either doesn't actually believe in climate change or is hopelessly ignorant.
At the very least Germany and other countries should be leaving the perfectly good nuclear plants they already have online until the end of their operable life as they build out renewables and shut down coal and gas. The priority should always be shutting down fossil fuels first.
Who funded these newcomers? Oil, gas and friends was a big part of it. We converted to coal instead as a result.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/china-starts-bui...
Maybe coal is just a convenient energy source.
Heavy oil is mostly imported, that initiative was focused on using domestic sources of energy. Coal always has outsized influence due to the US Senate.
This person is the most responsible person for the situation we're in right now. She conspired with others to derail (literally in some cases) Nuclear power.
This is what happens when you follow uninformed advocates from Hollywood. People should learn to despise "influencers." They know little but aim to move people to action based on poor or very poor understanding of the things they propose and base their positions on emotion, mostly.
In particular, its very large "venting" of radioactive krypton gas that ran down to the river and spread out in neighborhoods on the riverbanks is never counted among its impacts.
The level of ignorance in the general population is astounding.
In 1979? Years before the Internet? Yes, people were ignorant.
Don't get me wrong, I'm the last person to defend ignorance in the general population, but you're speaking from hindsight.
For the sake of discussion, let's grant your point: Jane Fonda and co. delayed clean nuclear energy by four or five decades.
So what? What do we do about it today? How does that help convince the holdovers that we can actually make and run clean nuclear power plants?
(Just to be clear, I'm not against nuclear energy. Especially, I'm really hopeful about molten salt reactors and (eventually) fusion power.)
Use the same cloud they used to scuttle the tech to revive and invigorate the technology.
They should also stress people to seek facts by themselves and to not rely on mouthpieces and emotive arguments when making decisions and choices. To be critical and seek your own information.
Source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fus...
That was as true 30 years ago.
A Tokamak fusion plant would cost at least 10x fission, and fission is already far from competitive. So, absent aneutronic, fusion has no prospect ever.
It could have been earlier had there been more effort put into it in the past. Just look at that chart- even if the projections were wildly optimistic, it still seems like there was no political will to even try.
So, money spent on fusion is welfare for the military contractors who build the test articles, and for hot-neutron physicists who might be needed for weapons work.
It is good that a few plasma fluid dynamics physicists and their grad students get the odd bone or two, because it is a too-neglected field. It would be better to give them the whole budget.
It was and is a speculative technology, but what is the harm in reallocating funding from say, fossil fuel subsidies, into fusion R&D? Even as a purely scientific endeavor, who knows what kinds of useful knowledge and applicable by-products might be found along the way. If fusion is such a dead end, why have there actually been new discoveries made over the past several years, even if they might be hyped? Do you believe MIT/CFS, TAE, JET, or ASIPP are just burning money or something? Who are you to claim that a technology is impossible? Skepticism in fission does not have to convert to the dismissal of fusion.
I also do not back orbital, beamed solar power. That, too, could work. But it, also, would cost more.
Things that cost more displace less CO2 emission, per dollar spent. We have a need to maximize displacing CO2 emission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
Dr. Robert Bussard (RIP): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU He claimed that it would only take about $200M of engineering development to become viable.
There is a split between thermal-equilibrium designs, like Tokamak, and those relying on non-linear plasma fluid effects to achieve much greater compression in selected places and/or times where fusion should happen. Plasma fluid dynamics is tricky. Plasma fluid radiology is harder.
I'm not equipped to evaluate it either, just hopeful. :)
It's like expecting C&H would come around and denounce anyone who said, "ice-cream is great, I love sweets, let's all celebrate with sweets". Sure, if they were ethical, they'd mention how sugar is bad for human health and undermine their company.
Jane fond is like everyone else. But someone put her in the spot.
You can't possible mean this. She is more responsible than Putin? It's her fault that German politicians ignored all the warnings and choose to depend on Russian fossil fuel? It's her fault that we did not start the massive move away from fossil fuel we needed to do 10-15 years ago, and which would have stripped Putin of his fossil power?
They're obviously not talking about the current war waged by Russia but instead talking about the lack of nuclear reactors in the US.
It’s not unreasonable to think that if that movie and Fonda’s anti-nuclear bent never happened, nuclear would have become so profligate that nothing Putin did would have given him a hold over the Western energy sector.
But yeah, blame Jane Fonda....
IMO they should be used strategically, i.e. concentrated large power requirements and to lower overall emissions. You want a mix of power-generating solutions, otherwise you have a monoculture which can lead to system collapse. Right now they're short on gas, but what happens when they're short on uranium, or places to put spent fuel? You can't just spin up a new power plant over a weekend (which is their problem right now). Or if we had a supervolcano and solar went out, or if winds died down, or had a shortage of parts due to a pandemic or recession, etc.
We need many solutions to cover all our bases. You spin up and down capacity in each market depending on the circumstances. This allows the lowest cost, least harmful solutions at any given time, hedges against changing market conditions, and enables emergency power relief.
edit: LOL @ all the downvotes because I said a nuclear meltdown might be bad
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/reliance-...
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
But let's also remember that France sold their turbine business due to pressure of the DoJ[2], has been talking about repatriating it[3] (which has not happened yet), but as of now has 29 out of 56 reactors out of commission and as a result, the energy powerhouse France is buying energy from Bavaria[4].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/germany-reject-eu-green-inv...
[2] https://www.economist.com/business/2019/01/17/how-the-americ...
[3] https://www.ouest-france.fr/environnement/nucleaire/nucleair...
[4] https://www.merkur.de/bayern/atomkraftwerke-bayern-auswirkun...
Those are terrible explanations. There's a much simpler one: The oil and gas industry was able to corrupt Germany and not France.
It's a very nuanced issue, I don't think it's very informed to say it's just due to delayed inspections... The inspections were what found cracks due to corrosion, repairs are taking really long.
And France currently shows that nuclear isn't really a good choice for base load since they had to restrict power output due to heat. The plants are getting older and require a lot of maintenance.
Energy production of the future should not concentrate on nuclear. It cannot compete on price and environmental factors in Europe. There are other places were it would fit better.
It was neither. The German plan was to leverage "green" Russian gas for control over the EU. As usual, the grand German plan has ended with the continent on fire.
Unfortunately i can’t find a non amp/mobile link…
"expectation of eventual territorial expansion to the Baltic countries, Finland and Poland, with the approval of either the Western powers or Germany" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin's_speech_of_19_August_1...
German–Soviet Trade and Credit Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_Credit_A...
"In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San."
"With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia (Moldova & Ukraine). The German side declares its complete political disinterestedness in these areas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germany%E2%80%93Soviet_Union_r...
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Atomkraft-Bewegung_in_Deu...
More importantly, what Germany does have is a tradition of engineering excellence which is just the thing needed to design and build effective nuclear power infrastructure. France succeeded here so I see no reason why Germany could not if they only managed to convince - or push aside - the remaining recalcitrant 'green' politicos.
Nuclear power will not help fighting climate change and it is simply too expensive compared to other renewable sources. That is the opinion of leading engineers too and exceptionally widely spread.
Imagine a Germany which would have gone the route the French - who did build fast breeder reactors - went. Imagine the reduction in dependency on imported fuels and the reduction in emissions. Also imagine a German industry which would have been less dependent on combustible fuels due to the availability of lower-priced electricity. That industry would have been far better prepared for the rise of cheaper renewable electricity sources like solar an wind. Compare this to the current situation where those same 'greens' responsible for making this evolution impossible now voted for an increased use of coal-fired power plants to be able to close the last nuclear power plants.
[1] https://inis.iaea.org/search/search.aspx?orig_q=RN:23072049
[2] highly radioactive which implies a short half-life, this type of waste needs to be stored for a period of 100-300 years instead of the thousands required for spent fuel pellets. It also is of much smaller volume and as such solved the nuclear waste problem as well as (supposed) fuel problem.
Its reactors are getting old enough that their capacity factors have declined - in 2020 down to 62%. This isnt much ahead of the capacity factor of the best wind turbines (57%).
Theyll be in just as much shit as Germany this winter as nuclear output is projected to fall still further. Why people are giving shit to Germany for not following their model mystifies me. Theyll be lighting up the coal too.
The situation is a bit more nuanced than that. Yes the capacity factor has reduced but not only because they are getting old:
1. Wind and solar have priority access to the grid in France. If they are producing a lot, the NPPs have no choice but to cut their power output, reducing artificially their capacity factor. 2. The NPP reached their end of planned life, meaning they had to do an extensive refit to get a life extension. This is a bit more than just regular maintenance, these are upgrades to more current security standards. 3. As you said, the older the NPP become, the more maintenance is required
Taking this specific issue of nuclear. Nuclear Energy is objectively cleaner than other forms of energy generation and is objectively safe if you operate it properly. With that said, it seems like Nuclear Energy would be embraced by the ESG crowd, but that simply wasn't the case.
Now that the rubber met the road, the sentiment has changed. So was nuclear actually bad? Or was it just "bad". Almost seems that everyone was so obsessed with going green and getting rid of "big bad nuclear" that they forgot that they depend on it. Much like a kid quitting his job to pursue the arts and then realizing, he can't make rent without the job they just quit...
Same with crypto: The scammy-ness and un-pleasentness (ie of funding terrorists and organized crime) was always there, but news-worthy it got only once Canadian Truckers made use of it.
I'm not opposed to identifying situations where companies are getting away with something for free that they should be paying for, and then correcting that. For example, dumping chemicals into a river, or emitting toxic fumes into the air.
Somehow this turned into: "only solar, wind, and thermal are good, so everything other than those are bad. We need to shut down nuclear."
It would have been better if it was: "wow, these decades old designs did really well. We've learned a lot over the years, let's build newer, better, cleaner, safer nuclear plants and then shut down the old ones."
Well yeah, it is explicitly intended as a signal that investors can use to select virtuous companies.
You are commenting this on a thread in which people are praising France's 60 year old reactors and suggesting Germany keeps their 40 year old reactors running, which were built to last 40 years. "Running them properly" is easier said than done, and frankly, the naive and misinformed opinions spewed constantly about the topic by proponents are a strong argument against nuclear energy. Not that it matters anyway, no one in a position of responsibility is going to build them, regardless of how much Isaac Asimov fans on the internet are crying foul about it.
While this is definitely hyperbolic, it's becoming less so every day this insanity with energy continues.
a bit of an exaggeration? today: "Sizewell C: New nuclear power station granted development consent by the government ... French energy company EDF, which will partly fund the project, has said the plant will generate electricity for at least 60 years and will employ 900 people."
It is just the most expensive power, discounting externalities like CO2, disaster liability, decommissioning, and waste management. Include the latter, and it gets worse. Include CO2, and coal is worse.
The cheapest power, with or without externalities, is solar followed by wind. A dollar spent on those produces several times as many kWh as anything else.
They are of course intermittent, but that doesn't matter much because their share of total generation is low. As their contribution comes to dominate, we will need to add storage. Until then, money is overwhelmingly more usefully spent adding generating capacity, as is being done. But a hell of a lot more should have been and needs to be spent on that.
Walks through the numbers on what it would take to run California on renewables + storage alone.
Because of the intermittency, it seems like the costs of storage (even though it gets better/cheaper each year) maker it not possible.
Smaller real costs. It costs less to build and operate a solar or wind farm than just to operate an already-paid-for coal plant. It costs, just now, about the same to build and operate a solar or wind farm as to just operate an already-paid-for nuke. But renewable costs are still falling fast.
Cost of storage is falling faster than wind or solar ever did. By the time Cali needs to build storage -- after there is renewable generation capacity to charge it from -- it will be very cheap.
And storage has some very hard physical limits on scaling up that will prevent costs from falling a lot - mostly the actual amount of the elements on earth that are needed for the batteries.
If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell your readers?
I watched the video and I'm not sure I even caught what the problem was supposed to be? There was a vague implication that solar and batteries were expensive, but I didn't see any actual comparison to how much gas and nuclear would cost as an alternative.
Solar PV is the cheapest available energy, and California will probably generate about 3/4 of its energy with it. Currently about 50% of their electricity is gas, so whenever the sun is shining they can stop burning gas and save money and carbon.
Solar PV plus lithium batteries are already cheaper than peaking gas and so being rolled out for purely financial reasons and the price gap is only widening.
So when do the problems start?
Real utilities will rely on whatever storage is cheapest at the time they need to build it. Batteries will remain among the most expensive storage, but are good for load-smoothing.
Synthetic fuels cost more, but have desirable externalities: utilities can sell excess production. Those costs are falling fast, too.
It is legitimate to ask whether there will ever be enough lithium battery production capacity to to provide for both cars and utilities, but it is a made-up problem because almost all utility storage will not be lithium batteries, but something cheaper.
California already has quite a lot of pumped hydro capacity in place, and could add more cheaply by adding pumps to existing reservoir penstocks.
I feel like we're back at the point in the cycle were the detractors say "solar is a net negative" or "wind can never supply more than 17%". It's not based on science or economics just pessimism.
Fundamentally, solar and lithium batteries are cheap, abundant alternative that cost less than the next best thing. They're going to be a lot bigger than most people currently expect, especially in sunny regions like California with good regulations in the short term, and long term they will utterly dominate in Equatorial regions on market price alone.
Daily cycle storage has been a known solved issue for a while, we're just waiting for the pricing and deployment to catch up. And seasonal storage now looks likely to be green hydrogen, again solved before we really need it.
Just the queue of planned projects today in California, Chile and China is enough to show this is true.
Growth pains of a rapidly growing battery manufacturing sector should provide the opposite impression that people seem to take. Always with the "at current rates" stats to make change seem impossible.
Yes, new things that don't exist don't exist, that's why we invented them and built big factories to make them, because we wanted them to exist in large numbers.
Private companies will absorb some part of the societal cost of intermittent electricity, by letting factories and workplaces stay idle when power costs are high - this will filter down to lower wages for the employees of those companies.
The "engineering calculations" are so extremely simplified that I would call them wrong. You need a lot of water for nuclear plants btw. to conduct away the heat.
And especially in that dry regions with insane amounts of space solar energy would outcompete nuclear on every possible metric and it isn't close.
This is the problem: with current technology, if you include storage, solar / wind has both the worst prices and externalities.
Replacing storage with load-following (hydro, Geothermal, modern nuclear) is necessary unless we find ways of storage that beat current theoretical limitations
Absolutely false. Most storage used today (95%+) is pumped hydro, which is very cheap. Costs for all kinds of storage are falling even faster than solar or wind ever did.
There are no theoretical limitations on storage. Most storage is just E = Fx, understood and applied for centuries.
If you have to lie to make your case, what does that tell readers about your case?
Hydro is ideal, but the problem is it needs mountains and huge amounts of water, which aren't accessible everywhere
You also didn't address the main point: storage drives up costs and externalities which most people advocating for intermittent sources seem to completely sweep under the rug
I watched for a long time Germany virtual signalling about their commitment to phase out fossil fuels all the green stuff.
Then Greta BratBerg telling me I am the evil.
No compromises.
I am expecting germany out of ALL fussil + nuclear in 2025.
If they are cold they can make some soup with chilli to warm them up.
Historically, nuclearprojects take in avg 7.5 years to come online. [1]
Thats a long time, almost 2 full terms of a presidency (US). Plenty of time for political winds to change.
Instead of relabeling a rotten apple as 'edible' to investors, the EU should put something fresh that can be quickly consumed.
[1]https://euanmearns.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-build-a-nucl...
> Financial concerns may also deter investors from putting money into nuclear. Plants have vast up-front costs, and there is a long wait for profits due to lengthy development and construction times, particularly in comparison to renewables. Recent new-builds, including the Finland's Olkiluoto nuclear plant, France's Flamanville 3 and the U.K.'s Hinkley Point C, all suffered from huge delays and cost overruns.
> Such issues further complicate both efforts to raise investment for nuclear and policy makers' reliance on the technology to meet environmental goals.
That's what I already thought was the case and the article adds it as the last paragraph. I get a lot of people want to focus on the nuclear angle but it's only one part of a frustrating string of poor energy choices by Germany's politicians.
Edit: removed a word.
- Everything needs maintenance; nuclear plants are by no means unique in this regard. France may have planned badly, so that many plants are down at once, but this is not a systemic problem with nuclear power.
- Europe overall was unprepared for the heat wave, but we are not really concerned with energy demand during heat waves (which are short, and when sunshine is plentiful) but rather during the winter (which is long, and dark in EU).
So again, more nuclear capacity in Germany could offset gas-fired power plants throughout EU.
There had been plenty of warnings, because in the last 10 years it was quite common for the French grid to be borderline in the summer, cooling always was a tight spot.
And nuclear is a bad offset for gas-fired power plants, as they are rather used as quick power plants, that is something nuclear is the worst at.
The rest of your comment contradicts this.
>The French mostly suffers from the fact that it has become prohibitively expensive to build new reactors.
This is another red herring. You complained that French reactors are down for maintenance, I responded to that. Construction costs do not cause reactors to go down for maintenance.
To your second paragraph, again, the energy supply in the summer is not the central problem. Existing solar does well in the summer.
>And nuclear is a bad offset for gas-fired power plants, as they are rather used as quick power plants, that is something nuclear is the worst at.
Alone, this is true. However, batteries take up very little space and large installations can be put up quickly. Solar is nice in the long term but takes a long time to install at reasonable scale.
Germany is already the largest electricity exporter on the planet [0]. Germany is also the only economy of its size class that has an actual renewable share close to 50% [1], while comparable economies, like Japan or the US, hover at around 20% renewables.
In that context it's extremely questionable how Germany gets constantly blamed for all kinds of things related to energy, when it was literally were the renewable energy change was pioneered not just technologically [2] but particularly regulation wise [3].
[0] https://www.worldstopexports.com/electricity-exports-country...
[1] https://www.trade.gov/energy-resource-guide-germany-renewabl...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
This is not relevant, again, unless it would be impractical to install more transmission lines.
>renewable share
Using the wrong statistic is not a good comparison, what matters is the fraction of fossil fuels. The classification of "renewables" here is crafted to specifically exclude nuclear while for some absurd reason permitting hydropower (which is terrible for river ecosystems).
If you invent a metric specifically to support your ideology, it supports your ideology. However, it doesn't convince anyone who is paying attention to the facts.
>it's extremely questionable how Germany gets constantly blamed
It's not Germany that is truly to blame. It's the anti-nuclear movement which is to blame, and Germany is just one of its many victims. However, this movement led Germany to make bad decisions recently, and those decisions can be criticized specifically, regardless of what else was done.
It is very relevant, why should all the burden to fix all the worlds problems fall exclusively on Germany when Germany already has done so much and was literally the first to recognize the problem?
> The classification of "renewables" here is crafted to specifically exclude nuclear
Yes, because uranium is not a renewable resource, it's actually a very finite resource.
And if you want to see "wrong statistics" playing around with stuff like that, then you need to look at the UK who gets absurdly inflated "electricity from CO2 free sources" shares so it can act like its energy sector is renewable and sustainable, when it's really not.
> It's not Germany that is truly to blame. It's the anti-nuclear movement which is to blame
Just two paragraphs ago you were arguing for Germany to fix it, and now it's some "anti-nuclear movement to blame", all under a submission that comes from a rather questionable source, with its very own lobby, to begin with [0]
Since building new gas plants isn't really an option anymore, and renewable can't produce reliable electricity by themselves regardless of cost, we are back to nuclear.
[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-needs-20-30-gw-...
I wanted to explain what's wrong with this statement, because that's simply not true. But I don't have to: You just need to read the text that you linked to:
"As Germany ramps up renewables and exits coal and nuclear power, it may need more gas power capacity, which would mostly be put to use at times of high electricity needs and little wind or sunshine – and not necessarily lead to more overall gas consumption."
Gas is different from nuclear in that it's easy to regulate the power generated, which is necessary to deal with demand spikes and generation dips (the latter due to wind/solar which may not always be available). Presumably Germany would only ever want to rely on gas for this purpose.
There are ways to adjust nuclear power output but they are quite expensive (on top of the fact that any nuclear power plant is already expensive).
To get rid of fossil fuel power plants you need to match their exceptional ability to regulate power generation levels. You could do this by using nuclear for base generation and supplementing renewables with storage techniques (e.g. pumped hydro storage), but nuclear is unfortunately not a "drop in" replacement on its own.
Probably biased but reminds me of a recent talk by a Polish nuclear scientist explaining how this gas infrastructure is much more expensive than most people imagine. And it has to be regularly updated. So, if we are to factor in that cost, then brand new nuclear infrastructure and nuclear conversion isn't that much more.
Was it perhaps because of some hidden actors who pushed for the gas pipelines deals?
I can imagine, that the Russian influences in Germany hasn't magically disappeared after the fall of Berlin wall.
(Opposition to) nuclear energy is an emotional topic in Germany, one that mobilizes people. In a democratic society that leads to effects like the phase out of nuclear.
It’s mind-numbingly simple and I do not understand at all why conspiracies are mentioned left, right and center in this thread.
Also, the fact that in most countries there are multiple hidden agents acting on behalf of other countries hardly seems to be a conspiracy theory as well.
There's a substantial age cohort in Germany who can remember when their parents wouldn't let them play outside, or remember the runs on iodine tablets - people who's earliest understanding of the word "nuclear" was either in reference to Chernobyl or to fears of nuclear armageddon.
We know now that Chernobyl was a big deal in the immediate vicinity and not that huge of a deal continent-wide. But the climate in those early days was one of fear - in the midst of the Cold War a massive nuclear accident of unknown real severity in an untrusted neighbouring country was blanketing the continent in an unknown amount of radioactive material.
You can make truthful and rational arguments until you're blue in the face but the issue is emotive - a lot of people's minds have been made up by frightening experiences early in life.
Fukushima incident had a big impact on German public opinion. Even at the time it was a obvious over reaction from the Germans.
Merkel already went against public opinion when she put in place running time extensions in late 2010 to delay the phase-out, that was massively controversial decision.
Then only a few months later Fukushima blew up, so her already unpopular and controversial position became ultimately untannable. Particularly as many faults with German reactors were found during the [atom-moratorium](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium) that was declared after Fukushima.
Prior to that safety inspections were not even mandatory for the operators.
Add Chernobyl, Fukushima and the nuclear industry refusing to pay for the disposal of their waste, and Germany is a prime example of how and why nuclear fission is neither economical, nor sustainable.
> Especially that it hasn't happened in the neighboring France.
It's also happening in neighboring France [0], half their fleet has been offline for most of the summer [1]. A fleet that's already underfunded by billions [2], that's why the French reinvestment into new reactors was a very conservative and modest one with basically no reference to how even that will be financed.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/edf-extend-civaux-nuc...
[1] https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2022/04/30/681274/French-autho...,
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear-idUKKCN0VP...
It would make a massive difference for this winter.
Every one possible should be installed, it just won't make a dent.
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/eur...
Saying “if everyone would do X” isn’t very useful if the incentives aren’t in place that would compel everyone to do X.
Hopefully people are stocking up on coats!
There are roughly 40 million households in Germany based on some random numbers I found googling. If every one of them had a 1500 Watt space heater (woefully undersized for some, fine for others I imagine), and used them during the expected coldest day, you’d be throwing an extra 60 billion watt hours (aka gigawatts) of extra load on the grid right when renewables are least capable (typically).
That would also almost exactly double current German peak electrical energy consumption.
The grid would collapse.
As you might guess, in my current mood I’m not great at parties.
Together with significantly reduced electricity cost at night like in the past, this is probably the way to go if we wanted to go back to nuclear power.
This is already an issue in the UK with electric tea kettles during certain times [0], but those are only in use for a very short time, those German electric heaters would need to run a lot to get trough winter.
Yes.. it's a component. Yes I'm sure it will be employed. Yes it will stress the electric grid (but there is much more flexibility available). But it's not the solution to the majority of gas heating, because there simply isn't the capacity to get the required amount of hardware in the available time.
You can't even insure a nuclear power plant. That should tell you how safe the private market think they are.
For a fraction of the energy density that you get with nuclear power. Enjoy planting wind farms and solar farms costing huge amounts of land.
If you are crusading against land use a much better target is the beef industry.
You can, but we don’t, because people have preferences with their views and overcoming them takes time. We have a choice: nuclear or climate crisis. Putting ideological purity ahead of practical reality is dogmatic.
Isn't that equally true of nuclear energy? In fact more so, as renewables account for a growing share of global electricity production, while the share from nuclear has been decreasing for decades.[0]
Or do you literally mean "views" as in "sight lines" / "landscapes"? That's true, but people also have preferences about whether they're within a potential nuclear exclusion zone or not.
> We have a choice: nuclear or climate crisis.
That seems like a false dichotomy, or you're begging the question and not really explaining why renewables aren't an option. It's like saying, "We have a choice: clean, fuelless renewables or toxic nuclear catastrophes". Thinking that nothing can go wrong with nuclear is itself an ideology, and it's one that insurance companies don't share.
[0] https://www.powermag.com/report-nuclear-share-of-global-ener...
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
Add to that a greatly increased wind production capacity, and Germany is pretty close to even replace most usages of fossil fuels outside of electricity generation with renewable energy.
Remember that
Germany has about the same solar potential as Alaska [1]
Capacity factor for solar in Germany went from 5.7% in 1990 to 11.1% in 2019.
Even increasing it at 10%/year to double it would take 7-8 years.
It's not that simple to "just double it", Italy makes 43% of its energy from renewable sources, it's mainly hydro thanks to our geography and it's been like that since at least 20 years, but the numbers aren't going up very rapidly, there's a limit on how many dams you can build.
Also, renewable like solar and wind are increasing and replacing the thermoelectric (gas, coal, fossil in general), the problem is we still have to buy at least 10% of the required energy from other countries, that might or might not use fossil to produce it.
The point is not if we will be able to use 100% of renewable energy in the future, the point is "can we wait long enough for them to reach that point, before it's too late"?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany#Potenti...
What other ways would we have to achieve this goal in short notice?
Perhaps density matters if you're attempting to escape a gravity well, but Earth is big and space is not a concern.
Y'all know enough sunlight hits the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year, right? [2] It's fusion at a distance. Someone else handles the waste, the safety risk, there is no neutron embrittlement issues.
[1] https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565
[2] https://gulfnews.com/uae/environment/two-minutes-of-sun-enou...
(i support running existing nuclear generators as long as safely possible, and Germany should start them back up)
https://electrek.co/2021/02/26/elon-musk-tesla-shifting-more...
https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-b...
https://cleantechnica.com/2022/06/08/byd-to-supply-lfp-batte...
https://www.energy-storage.news/lfp-to-dominate-3twh-global-...
https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-VEHICLES-METALS/010092...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/07/18/theres-big-money-in-r...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/modern-renewable-energy-c...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-cumulative-capac...
(i personally prefer lfp due to lower thermal runaway risk for stationary storage applications; the lack of expensive conflict minerals and lower costs are a cherry on top)
http://www.withouthotair.com/ provides a really good analysis of why nuclear must be included.
The energy demand can't be met with solar/wind alone.
I don't want to speak ill of the late great David MacKay, but it does seem that reality has exposed his pro-nuclear bias, which was already apparent[2] just from the choice of language he used when describing the different technologies.
[0] https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2017/3/30/l6qcqgoedse1...
[1] https://climate.lifeitself.us/without-hot-air/#why-this-proj...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/d1rwe/david_ma...
china is just not stupid and will focus on a single technology. what they do with nuclear is probably less than 25% than what they will build with solar and wind, besides that they plan to build over 30 plants, which would probably end in a desaster in the eu or us.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/average-annua...
This is a tired argument. Ten years ago, the green movement was saying the same thing and in ten years, they'll be saying the same. It's always a good time to invest in green power, although it would have been even better to do it ten years ago.
https://www.freeingenergy.com/land-usage-comparison-solar-wi...
On a windless night, nuclear still produces power.
Note that as far as solar goes there might not be such 'cost' in the future: experiments putting solar panels over farmland, like 30% coverage give or take, show hardly any effect on crop yield. I don't know how/when this is going to be rolled out, but it does sound quite interesting. I mean the land use for farming is huge.
By saying “yes, it’s better than coal but not as good as wind/water/solar/geothermal” you’re missing the forest for the trees.
People are using coal and gas today. Without moving to nuclear we will keep using coal and gas. There is no near-term future where we can live on 100% renewable energy.
Pumping water with excess power up into a reservoir to later use for hydro power, or something along those lines, is likely the only "battery" big enough to power a country.
This is only because fossil fuel power plants are never held liable for the millions of premature deaths they have causes over the last few decades.
- Fukushima happened, emotionally it helped the anti atom campaign
- Germany is the lead manufacturer of solar panels in Europe
- former German Chancellor Schröder (already chairman of Nord Stream and a good friend of Vladimir Putin) was nominated for Gazprom board
Sources: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26603464, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26673987.
> I’m not sure why Germany thought that it would be a good idea to decommission nuclear energy
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29278996
and
https://www.ans.org/news/article-1392/robert-anderson-antinu...
They also have proliferation concerns and have therefore been limited to nuclear powers.
All that happens with a dam, is one ecosystem is replaced with another. Some animals die off, others replace them.
Literally, a dam isn't replacing the tiniest part of an ecosystem in Quebec. Trillions of acres, upon trillions, and only thousands for dams.
Meanwhile, there are far more deadly things with nuclear plants.
I think I'm lucky in Quebec, as such dams can be located away from people, thus reducing danger of a dam breaking.
The biggest mistake environmentalists ever made, was to fight dams. You cannot even remotely compare burning coal, or gas, or oil for power, with a dam.
Yet environmentalists fought dams, and nuclear in the 70s, the 60s, and look where we are now.
Still spewing CO2 like mad.
How about we jump up and down for joy, at a dam, or a nuclear plant instead of naysaying either?
Priorities...
I don't see the rest as major issues. Again, power lines through a tiny tiny tiny fraction of nature are not a biggie.
I just always have to compare... coal? Weird plans to pump CO2 underground, as if it'll never escape?
I prefer dams over nuclear. Beavers cause more change on rivers than our dams.
But I am not against nuclear!
Hydro is great for boaters and sport fishing, but no so much for the ecosystem it drowned. And it's always square miles of devastating rapid change.
Seeing everything through the "how expensive is it" lens is exactly what is making us burn our own planet though. Price should be the least of our concern when we discuss the future of our planet. Money has no value if you can't breath
It's the equivalent of somebody pointing out; "This is too expensive, we can't finance building or running it" and somebody replying with "Money is just invented, it's not real!".
As true as that might be philosophically, practically it still doesn't change anything because the practical reality we live in is dominated by economic interests manifested trough money.
So if your solution does need massive amounts of money, then you need to explain where they money is supposed to come from, as you can't just "wish" nuclear reactors into existence.
Then we can talk about the thousands of lives lost to lung cancers due to coal: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/merkel-says-climate-be-...
How do you price that in ?
> then you need to explain where they money is supposed to come from
idk, when I see the US spending 8-10 trillion dollar in 20 years in Afghanistan I think money really isn't the problem here, we could have nuclearised the entire West twice over and still have extra, priorities I guess...
> as you can't just "wish" nuclear reactors into existence.
Yeah but you can wish them out, and wish for solar and wind farms to replace them, too bad these wishes didn't actually work out.
Also, electricity is twice as expensive in Germany than in France, always been, and that's just the beginning of the whole coal/gas shitshow that's about to hit in the winter. Germany has the most expensive electricity of the EU zone too.
Isn't it something to cherish then that renewables enables precisely that?
That's American fiscal policy, but we are talking about Germany here, which has way less debt per GDP [0] [1], so for the most part Germany knows how to handle its money and where to best put it.
> Yeah but you can wish them out, and wish for solar and wind farms to replace them, too bad these wishes didn't actually work out.
Except Germany didn't just "wish", it acted and created the conditions for a renewable boom, to compensate for the long-term fission phaseout, it did that trough the first green electricity feed-in tariff scheme in the world already back in 1991 [2].
That's why Germany nowadays sits on nearly 50% renewables even after shutting down fission reactors; Those reactors were very much mostly replaced by solar and wind [3].
> Also, electricity is twice as expensive in Germany than in France
See the aforementioned EEG, that's why electricity, and also gasoline, is so expensive in Germany; There is an extra tax on it that has been used to pioneer the research [4] and deployment of PV and wind before these technologies were adopted widespread globally, thus turning them into the efficient profitable industries they are today.
German subsidies paid for that R&D and scaling up part, jut like they were, and still are, a major contributor to where these technologies are today.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/government-debt-to-gdp
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-t...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
[3] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON#Examples_of_industrial...
It is all doable, but it is expensive.
Just like people (ie armchairs ecologists) protested in France against the preemptive cutting and burning of small parts of forests to prevent fires, they won, two days ago the entire forest burned. To save a few hundred trees they sacrificed the whole forest.
Germans don't like nuclear because "what if Fukishima happens in Germany", so instead they gas themselves with coal/gas fumes which are thousands of time worse in every single aspects, there is no "big boom" possible with gas/coal, it's a slow suffocating death, which apparently is not as scary
So if you believe Bonhoeffer, then it can be argued armchair intellectuals have an obligation to not be stupid. And perhaps Germany and France should fine the stupid, or possibly put them in prison.
I‘ve not been able to find a source to back up this claim.
Which one is it?
Carbon dioxide or water vapor?
BTW your argument is based on the same perfect world where things like Fukushima don't happen. Germany already has a problem with it's existing nuclear waste and is far from solving it.
yes
> where things like Fukushima don't happen
When Germany is hit by a Tsunami hit me up I'l pay you a beer
For every nuclear related death you have hundred thousands of coal related deaths, it's that simple. The potential, yet highly low probability, big boom scares you more than the inevitable slow death that's all, it's purely irrational
I meant an nuclear accident not a tsunami. Just like Fukushima was hit by a catastrophe bigger than expected the same could happen in Germany. Maybe a plane crash, none of the existing power plants is germany is build to withstand one.
And who said about coal instead of nuclear? Coal is used because german politicians intentionally blocked wind and solar power.
Great then that the alternative is renewables without the negative side effects of either fossil fuels or nuclear!
There's no big boom possible with nuclear energy either.
Or my counterpoints, as found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32027004
In reality the largest battery installations in the world can run the grid they are attached to for a few minutes.
That thing was supposed to last for many centuries, yet after only a few decades it became such a huge environmental mess that it will take several future generations, and a lot of money, to clean it up.
Which is only one among the many reasons why nuclear fission was declared not sustainable, others include resource dependencies for the fuel and generally extremely high costs for everything, while operators refuse to pay their share for it in terms of waste disposal.
All problems that "pro nuclear" people regularly handwave away, often pointing at France to go "Look, they can do it!", when that's just completely ignorant of the actual state of the French energy sector; It's existing nuclear fleet is already heavily underfunded, it's also very old, as a result of that more than half of French nuclear reactors have spent most of this summer offline.
That is if they ain't throttled/shut down due to heatwaves making them impossible to cool.
Say, we create a nuclear plant in outer space (maybe around the moon orbit?) where there's no risk of nuclear waste "falling down" to earth if shit happens.
Then, said plants are used to generate energy and store it in some high density material (maybe liquid hydrogen?).
Finally, some of that energy is spent to "push" the large hydrogen tanks into Earth's orbit so that they fall down into earth.
This way the nuclear fusion issues would not matter and this could be scaled a lot.
I think that we have all the technical pieces to do this, but it is just a matter of some large company developing the project, even if starting small.
why would you rain large hydrogen tanks into the earth? why not push them out into space.
> In France, nuclear availability is currently at 24.8 GW, less than half the installed capacity of 61.4 GW due to safety checks at several reactors.
The real problem isn't electricity, it is natural gas as a feedstock for industry and for heating. There you don't have the same instant fungibility pure electricity brings, and nuclear can't magically solve either.
Arguing against nuclear because “electricity doesn’t help heat houses” is extremely strange, bordering on deceptive.
I firmly believe heat pumps and renewable energy is the future. But that can only become the solution in the time span of 5-10 years.
No where there is abundant nuclear visible, new build projects have vastly overrun any time and fiscal budgets.
This is something solar/wind zealots often like to repeat, while hand-waving away the fact that those energy sources work when they want to, not when you want them to.
If you want a reliable, clean power grid, there's one option, and it's not solar and wind.
Maybe those are possible. Maybe they aren't. We don't know. There is precisely one known working option.
To me the French nuclear situation is just another example of why privatizing public infrastructure is an exceptionally stupid idea. In the free market, the consequences of failing to perform long-term infrastructure maintenance is a negative externality, and so it doesn't get done.
> On 6 July 2022, French prime minister Elisabeth Borne announced that "the French government is aiming for a full nationalization of" EDF.[31][55] Borne "vowed" to limit the impact of the rise in energy prices through the state having "full control over...electricity production and performance.” Borne told parliament, "we must ensure our sovereignty in the face of...the colossal challenges to come."[56] Earlier in 2022, President Emmanuel Macron had "suggested" a renationalization of EDF as well as a "big expansion of nuclear energy in the coming decades"[57] however, in 2021, he had to scrap an "overhaul" of EDF, codenamed "Project Herculesl," that would have placed EDF's profitable renewables sector in a new company, due to opposition by unions and objections raised by the European Commission.[58]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_Franc...
For context, this measure was an effort to help competitors not rise their prices too much for the end consumers. Instead of taking the money from its budget, the State took it from EDF's.
[1] https://www.edf.fr/groupe-edf/espaces-dedies/journalistes/to...
In that view it all makes sense, especially that the government still does not publish how much it costs to generate the electricity. Only the subsidized rates the public pays.
But about these number it's true, lot of maintenance is usually pushed back to the summer so it's ready to take the high load of heaters in the winter. You can check it real time here: https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/la-production-delectricit...
Also since 2010 French energy production have to be sold by EDF at loss to help private reseller make more margins and "open the market". This cause several bn of loss per year which is money not available to construct new reactors or pay for proper maintenance. EDF was also forced to buy Areva when their reactor branch went under because of abysmal management of money on major projects... which EDF now also have to support. Long story short French energy production isn't looking good lately, reactors are getting older and only one is currently being made but the project is several years late.
To allow this the population get subsidized electricity, and everyone else can read about the amazingly cheap electricity in France even though it's a pure subsidy.
In 2010, as part of the progressive liberalisation of the energy market under EU directives, France agreed the Accès régulé à l'électricité nucléaire historique (ARENH) regulations that allowed third party suppliers access up to about a quarter of France's pre-2011 nuclear generation capacity, at a fixed price of €42/MWh from 1 July 2011 until 31 December 2025.[57][58][59]
> As of 2015, France's household electricity price, excluding taxation, is the 12th cheapest amongst the 28 member European Union and the second-cheapest to industrial consumers.[60] The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh.[61]
The logical connection makes no sense. If you want to keep something alive and need subsidies for it, why would you on top of that decide to make even more losses on it? Now, we could agree that maybe France did not have the choice to agree. But don't use ARENH as a proof that nuclear is subsidized
However, the Areva-Siemens (and Alstom) quagmire, and the insane electricity market liberalization pushed by the EU have also played a role. German policies not only managed to destroy domestic nuclear, but also cripple the French.
Why do I always see this shameless bullshitting in favor of nuclear energy?
We had a better infrastructure 30 years ago, back when politicians had long term plans for the future of their country and planned further than to the next election
> The renewable-energy field employs nearly 340,000 people in Germany, and according to the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), there are now more than 180 universities and 120 research institutes involved in the country’s energy-transition programme, Energiewende.
Pulling out of nuclear might have been a net negative for Germany but a net positive for the rest of world.
But we've decided we don't want that model anymore. It's ironic that people who have been participating in protests about global warming are the very ones that will pay the brunt of the cost through inflation and scarcity of heat/energy
That's a bit dual sided. Germany basically let France be their "battery" with it's nuclear reactors.
Germany also ensured that on the EU energy market energy out of renewables had to be bought first. Meaning that nuclear reactors became less profitable while Germany conveniently relied on them when there was low wind or low sun. That was quite a scummy move.
But renewables is the real key for energy transition. The reality is that very few countries plan to move most of their energy production to nuclear. Even RTE (the French electricity company) said they will need to crank renewables to 50% of their energy mix to meet carbon neutrality by 2050 with their most pro-nuclear scenario (N03).
Making renewables more competitive globally might have largely compensated the gas/goal emitted by Germany if it contributed to help developing countries to skip the fossil stage.
According to Wikipedia the initial Energiewende legislation included nuclear as a bridging fuel. Its phaseout was brought forward after Fukushima. Germany could have made the same investments in renewables and kept nuclear, then it would have been further along in phasing out fossil fuels.
I'd assume that the previously shut down nuclear plants weren't "scuttled" and are still able to be brought back online - does anyone here work in the industry and/or have any idea what that process would entail, and what costs would be incurred?
They only need political permission."
So stop spreading one sided information.
Technically the PreussenElektra CEO is Guido Knott, they operate and have a substantive ownership of the German nuclear plants. Preusenelektra is a subsidiary of E.ON, where Leonhard Birnbaum is the CEO you mention. His opinion follows the government decision. In a letter to the people working for Preussenelektra he wrote:
"The German government has examined the contribution that the remaining nuclear power plants can make to solving the current energy crisis and, after weighing the options, has come to the decision that nuclear energy should not be part of the solution [..] This decision must be respected [..] I can imagine that one or the other of you had hoped that for a while, as a transitional solution, nuclear energy would still have some way to go."
As quoted in "Rheinische Post" (Wednesday edition, 22 june 2022)
Now Bernd Guhlich, communication of PreussenElektra acknowledges this in the interview. Without the OK of the government and by proxy CEO E.ON Leonhard Birnbaum nothing will happen. The E.ON CEO is not the decision or policy maker here, that's the government (which is by definition open to public debate). But, and that was the point Bern Guhlich was making (which is not one sided as he acknowledges the decision): Isar can technically run for longer then the end of this year if the government decides to do that. The Bundesministerium fuer Wirtschaft und Klimaschutz (a department of the government) decided against that for reasons Bern Guhlich argues are false:
* there is no legal basis
* the 3 nuclear plants cannot operate longer without fuel rods
Additionally the tweet from Mark Nelson asserts: "Chancellor Scholz and Economy Minister Habeck have been falsely claiming that nuclear plants cannot operate because of staffing and lack of fuel."
Perhaps you mean that there are other reasons the CEO mentioned in the article you refer to: extension would be of limited energy benefit.
And pretending that there wouldn't be staffing issues is ridiculous.
Fuel-wise, months are feasible. And exit from atomic phase-out is not feasible in the short term.
One source, yet three answers here that say the source is mostly wrong by telling half-truths.
The owner of the plant is someone a level higher in the hierarchy than the statement giver in the video, and he/they said, that they do not want to run the plant. Technically it is feasible, says the interviewee. But it would cost the owner money, so the company actually has no interest unless they get compensated, by a lot: the nuclear phase-out means they make the profits, payed by the state, without cost and risk of actually running the plant. If they cannot phase it out, they have costs, and would not be eligible for the phase-out deal money.
Living in a sunny state, I’d love to see solar on everything; the more the better. But to backstop that, nuclear seems like by far the best option.
Sometimes major decisions have outcomes that can only be fully appreciated with decades of hindsight. This one was obvious with minimal foresight.
1 - https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy#:~:text=....
The title is about "thinking", not something that is actually likely to happen. Some parties, without consensus, are claiming it would be a good idea. The people in charge say that this won't happen, because of material reasons.
The industry does not even want to run longer. It is technically feasible for some months. Legally, it is not feasible yet.
Cost/gains wise the some-month idea could make sense, but new certifications are needed, so perhaps only in times of rare energy this could be a profitable arrangement.
In their "About us" page they decry "consensus science" and "global warming alarmists"..
Which is a way too common issue with a lot of the online reporting on German fission; Giving straight up wrong history and info based on very questionable motives.
Case in point; The article, once again, claims it was Merkel who decided the exit, allegedly in 2011, when that's plain and simply wrong. Merkel pushed trough extremely unpopular running time extensions in 2010, then Fukushima exploded in 2011 and the running time extensions were revoked during the course of the atom-moratorium, as during safety inspections the reactors were found not to be safe enough to run that much longer [0].
That's also why some reactors never came back online from the moratorium; They were found too unsafe to be turned back on. But their remaining electricity contingency was added to the remaining ones, which is what will allow them to run for longer.
At least if the German government will pay for that extra run time, as the nuclear operators themselves are unwilling to do so [1].
There is literally decades of more history there, several big government subsidies for the nuclear industry along the lines of "Privatized profits, socialized losses" [2], while at the same time sabotaging the renewable built out [3], all under allegedly "nuclear hating" Merkel.
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium
[1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/akw-betreiber-gegen-l...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d...
[3] https://www.dw.com/en/renewable-sector-wary-of-cdu-promises/...
Progressives have been pushing to phase out harmful energy sources (among many other things) since more than half a century across the developed world. There was always push-back from conservative voices, NIMBYs and just generally ignorant people, but that is starting to weaken and we see more and more convergence.
- First, the concerns, typically based on scientific evidence, was simply ignored.
- When voices got louder, there was a push-back based on economic concerns, still ignoring the threat of pollution.
- Meanwhile a wave of propaganda started to saw doubt about the effects of pollution, climate change and so on.
- At first it was said that climate change will not happen.
- Then it was said that climate change is not man made.
- Denying climate change was becoming unpopular, so they started talking about feasibility, nitpicking, ad-hominem/ridicule and distraction.
All of this time everyone could have invested time, money and brain power into shifting to renewable energy, energy storage, energy efficiency, insulation etc.
And now since more and more weather changes and catastrophes are actually happening, there are suddenly people from the same camp talking about bringing back nuclear. Why? Because of an political issue that nobody predicted and is completely unrelated to the global threat of climate change.
But this is a good thing. It is the first step to realization that everyone should put much more effort into sustainable energy and peripheral issues. It might happen for the 'wrong' reasons, but it will happen.
What's interesting here is how Germany's public policy is swaying in the winds of current events. First it was Japan's experience that triggered the country to pull the plug on nuclear. Now it's the Ukraine war triggering them to plug that sucker back in.
Sacrificing the long term for the short was in former times described as a characteristically American problem. I remember reading article after article about how far-sighted the European governments were. How they built consensus across public and private sectors, working on a scale of many years rather than just one quarter. How much better equipped they were to weather bad times.
It turns out all democracies face similar problems (The People want benefits without pain), but good times create illusions to the contrary for a while.
I just can't understand, strategically, how such huge decisions can be made so quickly and totally going against the interest of your own people and economy.
I mean, they just messed up badly.
Why not? Can they not build LNG terminals?
The European perspective is most strongly influenced by movements starting post Chernobyl.
This happened not only in Germany but also in Sweden and other countries. In Germany, for some reason (please tell us you German HN users) this movement has had an outsized impact and not even Merkel could stop dismantlement of nuclear.
It shouldn't take a crisis to rethink things, but we are humans and so it does.
What is the German perspective?
We're about to follow Germany's mistake and yet none of our politicians are talking about it.
Sure, we have a hilariously rocketing energy prices. But this is not an accident. It was easily predictable result of their actions.
That's an odd claim. In Germany the Green party was the only party promising to scrap the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia before last year's elections.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-election-greens-n...
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/news/europe-outlines...
https://www.iea.org/news/energy-saving-actions-by-eu-citizen...
"According to the plan’s findings, turning down the thermostat by just 1 °C would save around 7% of the energy used for heating, while setting an air conditioner 1 °C warmer could reduce the amount of electricity used by up to 10%. With an average one-way car commute in the EU of 15 kilometres, working at home three days a week could reduce household fuel bills by around €35 a month, even after taking increased energy use at home into account. And as the average car in the EU clocks up about 13 000 kilometres a year, reducing cruising speed on motorways by 10 kilometres an hour could cut fuel bills by an average of around €60 a year."
Guess they got the memo regarding the impracticality of going without either fossil or nuclear fuels.
there's no way nuclear can be decentralized, even with relatively tiny reactors, the waste management requires too much discipline.
If the Japanese couldn't avoid a disaster, and considering discipline would come easy to them, I don't think nuclear can ever be truly safe and distributed.
solar and wind are more resistant to centralization.
Modern nationalism has killed more people than any political ideology.
If they didn't support intervention, I assume they would have faced even worse consequences from allies.
And the German delegation to the UN laughed in Trump's face when he confronted them on their dependence on Russia.
We reduce nuclear energy use to avoid things like radioactive waste, etc.
Bad actors like Putin p!ss on attempts to go renewable.
We go nuclear.
Bad actors like Putin p!ss on attempts to use nuclear safely (by doing X).
Rinse
Repeat
At some point, you have to deal with the bad actor.
And no, I don't have any solutions.
Hmm
> At some point, you have to deal with the bad actor.
Sounds like you do.
Fusion as it exists today (eg ITER) is a massive boondoggle. Hydrogen fusion fundamentally loses energy from neutron escape. To add insult to injury, those neutrons also destroy the reactor.
As for fission, of the almost 700 fission plants humanity has ever built, exactly zero have been built without massive government subsidy. Why? Because they're expesnive to build, maintain and operate, uneconomically so. And that's before you even get into the issues such as:
- What do you do with the fuel processing waste (eg UF6)? Some claim this problem is solved (eg reprocessing UF6 -> UF4) but it's not solved but it's not economic;
- What to do with the fuel waste? Putting it somewhere geologically stable and hoping for the best for thousands of years is... less than ideal.
- Can humans be trusted to run nuclear plants long term? Corporations notoriously cut costs that don't have immediate impact but the failure modes of fission plants are catastrophic. Governments too suffer from corruption;
- Can governments regulate fission plants at scale?
I support Germany delaying nuclear power plant closure because of this crisis but this in no way will be a return to nuclear power.
But let's examine how we got here and this is the part that makes people unreasonably mad for some reason. Yes, Putin is the unjustified aggressor but you cannot ignore what role US foreign policy played in creating the Ukraine crisis through NATO. The US would never accept the equivalent level of expansion of a hostile military alliance the way we somehow expect Russia to. I mean the US almost started World War Three over Cuba after instigating the Cuban Missile Crisis by installing Jupiter MRBMs in Turkey.
This war in Ukraine is a massive boon to the US military industrial complex. The level of military aid we're giving to Ukraine is oddly similar to the income defense contractors "lost" by ending the war in Afghanistan.. Weird, huh?
https://twitter.com/marcusgilmer/status/1044604107997237249?...
Germany is looking very stupid in their current situation and they now found out that he was right. The hard way.
They need to act.