Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

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Nope, there never was that much nuclear in Germany and most of that is gone now. Maintaining what is there was never going to matter a whole lot. And building new nuclear plants takes way too long for that to be relevant as well. The problem is now, not in a decade from now. Nuclear power is just not very useful when you need it in a hurry. And there are plenty of cheaper alternatives if you have a few decades to spare. All of which are being considered right now.

The issue with gas in Germany is not generating electricity but using it for heating and industry. Nuclear cannot really help with that. There were a only a few GW of nuclear left at the beginning of the year. I believe some of that is being kept online a bit longer. Or they are considering to. But it's just a few GW. All little bits help of course but accelerating the tens of GW of wind coming online in the next few years is much more productive to obsess about keeping the few GW of nuclear power. Not actually against that but it's just not enough to matter much at all.

This is untrue. 20GW of nuclear shut down over the past 20 years. That is almost as much as the coal that is being burned at the moment. Coal and gas are currently providing 66% of demand (40GW). Wind+solar only 7%. If that 20GW of nuclear were still available it would replace half of the coal and gas currently burning at this very moment. You can follow along at electricity maps anytime you’re curious to see just how dirty and broken the German grid is in reality.

Do you have a source for that?

As far as I can tell, in 2020 over 50% of German electricity came from renewable sources. The market share of fossil fuel has also been rapidly dropping over the last few years.

As mentioned taken from a snapshot at the time of Electricity Maps, check it out: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

So when you said "currently" you actually meant "right at this moment". Because currently (as is "this year") about 50% of Germany's electricity generation comes from renewables.

Right. But if you want to look at 12 months (fair enough) then 50% being dirty electricity generation is nothing to be proud of is it? It's still one of the dirtiest grids in the planet with an average >500gCO2/kWh. And it's average coal production over that time appears to be 21.2GW. So if over a 12 month period then if Germany had retained it's nuclear it would replace MORE than half of it's fossil fuel produced electricity. Even better.

His data might have been wrong but 20GW of nuclear extra nuclear would still be incredibly useful.

Let alone simply building more of it and solving the problem.

Because its of course easy to say that 50% is coming from X but this is bought with under capacity in the rest. If you have a long time period where you have low wind and solar utilization you need backup that you can ramp up.

Most of that 20GW is long gone and decommissioned. Only three plants (8GW) remained at the beginning of the year. It's not nothing. But also not that much. Only two plants remain now.

Nuclear is very bad at ramping up. It's very expensive to shut down and restart nuclear plants. One of the headaches with the remaining plants is that they would have been due (over due actually) for a lengthy shutdown for maintenance and inspection reasons. The two remaining plants will be kept online until April 2023 now; a few months past their original closing date. By then, most of the French plants that have been offline for maintenance should be back online. As others have noted, France has been leaning on German energy exports a bit more than usual for this reason.

Yes that's the point right. It's gone and decommissioned for really bad reasons. A political deal that satisfied those who were more anti-nuclear than anti-pollution. In an alliance with those who were more pro-fossil-gas than pro-climate. And now Germany pollutes many times more than it otherwise would. We should absolutely take a lesson from this.

This is now; often wind+solar is closer to 100%. Snapshots don't make sense. One of the reasons why Germany currently has to burn that much coal and gas, btw, is that France needs it due to the number of reactors in maintenance mode. Generally speaking, I somewhat agree with you - wind+solar isn't going to work without mid-term storage or extensive inter-european grid connections.

Not anymore, reactors are restarting:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/french-nuclear-produ...

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