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Comment by tpmx | Hacker News Reader

"We are going to have a severe lack of energy, so shutting down nuclear power plants is likely the least of our issues"?

I'm afraid I don't follow the logic here.

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Shutting down the German nuclear power plants does not help the situation obviously but right even turning them on now is not going to help us at all over the winter. First of all not enough energy gets generated from there in the grand scheme of things, secondly they would not be operational in time.

If you want to look for more nuclear to turn on, have a look at France where less than 50% of nuclear power plants are currently generating energy.

Homes are heated with gas, not with nuclear power. Industrial processes run on gas, not on nuclear power.

Problem is, without nuclear power, they will have to resort to generating power from natural gas instead of using that gas for heating, which will in turn have problems compound.

Right now gas plants are running to stabilize the grid in France...

That may be true, but that's orthogonal to the entirely home-made problems Germany is facing right now. While not a complete solution, using the remaining nuclear plants is an obvious stopgap measure to at least alleviate those problems in the short term.

Uh, as far as I know, that's forever been the case? Nuclear is too slow to react to events, so we always need some safety margin that gas can provide?

France's issues with nuclear are long lasting. They are running only 24 out of 56 power plants today and a lot of that outage is ongoing for many months. France is a net importer for almost a year I believe which is untypical for the country which normally exports cheap nuclear electricity.

Yes, France's current situation fucking sucks. However my answer was for this message:

> Right now gas plants are running to stabilize the grid in France...

As far as I know, gas plants have always been used to stabilize grid in France.

Yes, but if you can use less gas for electricity generation you have more for the other uses. Germany has other sources of gas besides Russia (e.g. Norway). The goal isn't to completely stop using gas at all, but rather to reduce dependence on Russia who only supplies 30% of German gas.

If there's no gas, most homes can heat with electricity. Turn on your oven, your gaming console, your TV, open your fridge's door, etc. Also as I understand it, it's much easier to do rolling blackouts on electricity than on gas, so gas will be more likely to fail for a long time than electricity.

Most industrial processes can be stopped without endangering people.

If people need to start heating homes with electricity, half a dozen old nuclear plants won't save us. You underestimate how much electricity it takes to heat a homes with resistive heaters.

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