I’m not sure why Germany thought that it would be a good idea to decommission nuclear energy in the first place. It’s the greenest energy source at scale!
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
Great then that the alternative is renewables without the negative side effects of either fossil fuels or nuclear!
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.
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.
I‘ve not been able to find a source to back up this claim.
There's no big boom possible with nuclear energy either.
- 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
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.
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.
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...
https://www.freeingenergy.com/land-usage-comparison-solar-wi...
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.
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?
On a windless night, nuclear still produces power.
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.
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.
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...
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.
They also have proliferation concerns and have therefore been limited to nuclear powers.
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.
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.
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.