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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

This is the smart/obvious thing for them to do, bravo. This is also a very negative thing for Putin and Russia. Glad to see more negative results to the Russians from their invasion.

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> This is also a very negative thing for Putin and Russia

This is to prepare for Russia cutting off gas entirely to the EU, which would cause harm to Russia's O&G revenue as a result of Russia's strategic choice, not due to EU actions.

Russia is making record profits off high gas prices, there were no negative results to their energy industry from their invasion. All of the negative results were from sanctions on the rest of their economy and from freezing their USD/EUR currency reserves.

Why did they not do that before and chose Russian gas instead of nuclear power? It's puzzling me what bad did they find in nuclear power.

Concerns about nuclear waste disposal top the list for my German in-laws, followed by the increasingly less-theoretical worries about providing scary targets for when the unprecedentedly long current peace ends.

Could you elaborate?

It's not going to affect the 10m+ gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, ovens or stoves, or any of the chemical industry that use 85% of the gas. It's not going to replace even half of the gas-fired power plants that use the remaining 15%. So why is it smart, obvious, or very negative for Putin?

Presumably because Germany won't have to start burning more fuel to replace the lost nuclear electricity, although I'm not op.

You could argue that it's getting outsized media attention compared to the impact, but any impact that reduces natural gas use is good for Germany, and anything that helps Europe withstand Putin's sanctions is bad for Putin.

The economic and safety questions seem settled, so the thing that stands in the way of this step being obvious is the self-image and identity of the German Green party.

Green voters are mostly fine with this, so it’s not a big deal for the party.

It's probably negative in the long term, since there is enough public awareness about the Russian gas imports being problematic and that nuclear power is being considered less of a problem than Russian gas. Also it means that political parties will likely add the sourcing of energy as an important part of their platform in the future, leading to debate as to what should be the future of energy in Germany and how independent or not they should be from Russian gas.

just out of my mind: they could export that energy(and maybe i'm wrong, but it is cheap to produce, somewhere next to gas) to countries that produce electricity from russian gas, at least till other sources will be used in that countries But I really don't believe they'll keep them running, seeing what german politicians have done in the past

Germany typically uses X joules of energy to run its economy. Some percent of that X comes via nat gas (and oil) from Russia. If they replace some of those Russian joules with nuclear joules, then a smaller percentage comes from Russia. That lowers demand for fossil fuels. That reduces revenue for Russia.

> It's not going to affect the 10m+ gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, ovens or stoves...

Not at once. But it certainly makes it easier for people to replace nat gas appliances with electric ones. If you are heating your home with nat gas and the price explodes, it would be beneficial to lower your thermostat and crank up an electric space heater to make up (some) of the difference.

The thing is that maybe around 1% of the joules can be replaced with nuclear. Most can't because connecting electricity wires to a gas-fired furnace does nothing (good).

I once started a bugfixing week with fixing a bug that caused around 1% of the crashes. My team lead didn't think that was either smart, obvious or very anythingatall, and said so loudly and clearly in the team meeting.

> The thing is that maybe around 1% of the joules can be replaced with nuclear.

Citation needed.

These plants are running now. Are you saying the electricity they are generating is not being used? The question is what replaces those joules if they shut them down?

They are providing like 6% of the German electricity. So yes, replacing them will require more fossil fuel short time. On the other side, the idea is to replace them with renewal sources. Germany is already at 50 renewables in the electricity mix.

Nuclear is not really a replacement for gas, rather than coal, due to its slow nature. Gas power plants are used in Germany mostly for quick peak power.

Most of the gas isn't used for generating electricity. Rather, it's used at the point where the electricity would be used. If you build a house you can install a furnace that gets joules from the electricity network or from the gas network, see? And there are a little over ten million houses and apartments that get their warm water and heating from gas-heated boilers/furnaces.

See https://www.haustec.de/heizung/waermeerzeugung/waermemarkt-w... for example. There's also the chemical industry, which uses gas as chemicals, not as a source of joules.

I think I misunderstood your question.

The plants are running now, but that doesn't make them able to replace gas. Most of the gas can't be replaced by them for the reasons in my other response, but I think your question was about the rest?

The rest is because of the different traits of nuclear and gas-fired power plants. Nuclear power plants aren't adjustable, they provide the same amount of power, day and night, plodding on, with only very slow adjustments. Gas is the opposite. Gas-fired power plants are easy to adjust on very short notice, to match the unexpected changes in demand. If you try to replace quick-changing power plants with slow-changing, the network's frequency (50Hz in Germany) suffers. When demand shrinks and the slow-changing power plant can't adapt, the frequency rises above 50Hz. When demand rises quickly, the opposite happens.

Some adjustment is possible by involving other entities than just the two, so it's not quite 0%.

Cheaper electricity pushes the market to favor electric heating over gas. The cost of switching from a gas furnace to an electric one will be worth it if gas becomes more expensive and electricity cheaper.

If you fix a bug that currently causes few crashes but would later on turn out to cause big issues, and you see that outcome in advance, then it would in fact be smart wouldn't it?

A fair part of the uranium burnt in many nations comes from Russia and its vassals. The first provider of France (22.1%) is... Kazakhstan.

US: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/russian...

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