Official petition to save Germany’s nuclear power plants

It wouldn’t change much about the current gas crisis. Miniscule changes, maximum. Because the gas crisis is not an electricity crisis [1].

91% of the gas used in Germany is not used for electricity generation.

It’s used for heating, for cooking, both at homes and for industrial applications, from industrial ovens and in the chemical industry think fertilizer, etc.

And even if we had the electricity “too cheap to meter” since the 90s, my assumption is that it wouldn’t have made a dent in the existing infrastructure of gas usage. There is an enormous 50+ years path dependency there, in a way housing infrastructure is technical debt on a gigantic scale.

Replacing all the existing infrastructure even with massive governmental support and the necessary subventions is a generational project, minimum 20 years in my estimation. First producing the necessary heat pumps and other electrical heaters, building out the net, isolating 100+ year old building, etc. Those are processes which need supply of electrical heater, a huge mass of people capable to install them and first and and foremost money to finance those massive expenditures. 20 years is my optimistic take.

And for our thought experiment, would people have done it, when not in a crisis mode? To never change a running system or only change it when being forced is simply human.

I’m neither arguing pro or contra nuclear electricity. I’m just annoyed because nuclear proponents never seem to think about what’s happens outside of their reactor, the distribution and the actual use. On paper “energy” is fungible. In reality it really is not. Or rather: only with the efforts a country-wide 100x Manhattan project.

When being repeatedly told that nuclear electricity would have helped, “How, exactly?” is not only a perfectly reasonable question but also the far more interesting aspect of the problem.

[1] Given how interconnected the European electricity net is, is there an electricity crisis possible? Cross-border trade not just exists but is for years an essential feature of the European net.