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Comment by chess_buster | Hacker News Reader

The heart of the issue in Germany right now is that the conservatives (coal) and the social democrats (gas) had sabotaged the switch to renewable energies during the last decade – which was otherwise well on it's way.

This entire discussion about nuclear is just a propaganda trick by the fossil fuel industry, which knows that nuclear can't be build in time. So people will rely on fossil fuels longer because they wait for nuclear while renewables and storage are presented as unattractive.

Just like Elon did with his hyperloop adventure to sabotage high speed rail.

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I think whether we should build new nuclear plants is a question that can be discussed between reasonable people. On the other hand, shutting down nuclear plants while there are still fossil fuel plants in operation seems ill-advised to me.

Note that most nuclear power plants are so old that they _need_ to be shut down or they will become a risk.

After Fukushima the shutdown of some of them was pulled up by a small amount of years, undoing that decision does make sense and should be done (and somewhat had been done in a roundabout way where the one side can pretend they didn't do it and the other side can complain they didn't do it but should it matter its basically as if the did it).

The problem is that they use the situation as an excuse to push other things which are neither necessary nor sane.

The situation is of course more complicated than that.

The grid is like a big Tetris board, and nuclear power plants are big multi-prong pieces: they can be good to cover a large surface, but sometimes, they block situations were a better configuration (which is at the end cleaner) is possible.

For example, the evolution of the grid may make a specific nuclear power plant not totally needed (because this region can now get cheap import, because the heavy industries in this area have changed, ...) while still expensive to maintain. In this case, shutting it down is a good idea. Another example, if you say "yeah, maybe we will built a nuclear power plant there, maybe, who knows", the risk of investing in a renewable power plant that would replace a dirty power plant may be not attractive to investors, and the dirty power plant will continue for years. But if you say you will exit the nuclear, then the renewable power plant is suddenly very attractive and the dirty power plant can, at the end of the process, be replaced. Another example, the grid needs a balance between production and demand, but demand is not flat during the day, there are peaks. Nuclear power plants, especially the not recent ones, may not efficiently produce non-flat production. In this case, the grid can evolve in a situation where too much "flat production" exists, and where a "flat production" power plant is the one that is not competitive anymore due to the maintenance costs. ...

Again, it's a matter of investment.

Keeping the old nuke running for ten more years costs more and winds up being less reliable than a new wind farm.

The moral is 'don't let your leader gut zero carbon investment for a 'job' in the gas industry'. Not 'spend your limited zero carbon investment in a much worse way'.

If every decade we say "Welp, we can't start building nuclear plants now because they won't be done for a decade" then it'll never happen. That long startup time has been the ongoing boogieman against nuclear since the 90's and it is certainly a real cost - but we can't stop-gap our way to a solution forever. Building out more coal power today while investing in nuclear is fine - it's not fine to just accept that if we can't do it in five years it's not worth doing.

Money is fungible.

Money spent building nukes is money not spent build out renewables that produce much more power for the money, and start producing immediately.

The amount spent on fossil fuels over the decade or two waiting for the nuke to come online would have bought that much renewable capacity, the which would have been displacing CO2 the whole time.

Isn't a nuke a nuclear bomb? If that is the case why call a power plant a bomb?

Bombs are also nukes. And apparently US Navy reactor engineers are, too. No one is confused.

Or just call it a nuclear power plant to avoid confusion?

No one is confused. As I said.

The problem is that because we need to progress in 5 years, it means that by 10 years we will hopefully have way more renewable solutions, which is cheaper than nuclear. So, investors don't want to pay for a nuclear plant that will be built in 10 years but when up and running, will not be profitable anymore because renewable would have changed the market.

It's a real problem for nuclear plants: we still need them as "baseline continuous" generators, but no-one wants to risk investing for a site when there is a large chance that this specific site will not be needed in 10 years, will be too expensive to run and not competitive, and will go bust.

We made the mistake 10 years ago by not planning ahead (even France, who was going to the nuclear route, messed up by not renewing and maintaining their know-how). But now, it's just true that building an expensive power plant that will not be used is just not a good idea.

The choice isn't 'nuclear or not' it's '1 nuclear or 2 renewables'.

If renewable investment was tripled and you could still wrest more money from the coal lobby then building nukes with that would make sense. Until then it just means burning more coal (which is precisely why it's being shilled so hard).

Even then spending money on a sodium ion or iron air battery factory will probably pay off sooner.

Oh please. There's no "time" until when nuclear must be built or something fails. And it's slow only because of the anti-nuclear sentiment. It's very much possible to build it quickly - just look across the border.

Look where? Even China takes 10 years to build a nuclear plant.

... And that's supposed to be bad? Even a solar project takes 10 years in Germany.

China can do a solar EV project in 3 months. So if it takes China 40X times as long to do nuclear than solar, how long would nuclear take in Germany if solar takes 10 years?

Fortunately it's all about the red tape, not actual construction time. Reduce it and you can build nuclear quickly.

Or you can reduce the red tape and build solar in 3 months or wind in 6 months. 10 years is not quick.

Solar/wind combined can never replace fossil fuels used by industry/for heating/as vehicle fuel. By several orders of magnitude.

So we need both.

Renewables supply approximately 25% of Europe's energy. Are you telling me it's impossible to quadruple the amount of renewable power generation in Europe? If Europe switches to heat pumps & EV's etc it'll need to double again. Still less than a single order of magnitude increase.

25% of electricity, definitely not 25% of all energy including heating and ground transportation, much less if you also include plane and ship traffic.

We'd need to build 800 more average nuclear power plants to replace fossil fuels in EU. That's like millions of average solar parks. Impossible.

> This entire discussion about nuclear is just a propaganda trick by the fossil fuel industry, which knows that nuclear can't be build in time

All you have to do is not turn them off, man. Or recommission the ones that were turned off a year ago. This isn't a conspiracy.

>the conservatives (coal) and the social democrats (gas) had sabotaged the switch to renewable energies during the last decade – which was otherwise well on it's way.

Why did they do that?

When many of your leaders on the boards of gas companies, Koch funded organizations, banks with massive fossil fuel investments, and are 'close personal friends' of Putin why would they not?

https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-former-chancellor-gerhard-sch... (he declined after the massive backlash, but is still on the board)

https://www.thelocal.de/20221013/merkel-says-no-regrets-over...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Merz#Other_activit...

not sure why you are down voted it pretty much sumes the situation up

Nuclear makes _financially_ no sense, only undoing the decision for a earlier shutdown done after fukushima makes sense. But building nuclear power plants takes at least decade a so it's not even an option to consider for short term handling of shortages in the next years and nuclear power was only ever cheap because of it being highly subvention.

It also makes geo strategically no sense as it's a sigle point of failure and a rather catastrophic point of failure, too.

Germany had a budding promising solar and wind industry which was basically killed of by politicians from CDU and SPD. Worse it's more then obvious that the politicians behind it have tight connections to the coal and gas industry to a point you could call it corrupt.

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