To think there were nuclear reactors already built and running perfectly fine in Germany. That were closed down presumably for ecological reasons. Burning coal and natural gas instead.
Germany spent an insane amount of money, punished the use of electricity effectively (therefore undermining their own competitiveness in EVs), caused a significantly negative impact on household finances and industrial competitiveness (to the advantage of coal-powered China) and still only gets roughly US level of cleanliness in electricity. Because they simultaneously decided to get rid of nuclear power plants. shrug
It's interesting how Poland's electricity mix has been 80% coal for decades and this passes without comment, but what really enrages some people is a few nuclear power plants in Germany being mostly swapped out with solar and wind energy.
Doesnt seem like environmentalism is really the core issue driving this.
In ten years, Poland‘s electricity mix will be much cleaner than Germany‘s.
EXPORTS
In 2021, Poland exported $926M in Electricity. The main destination of Electricity exports from Poland are: Lithuania ($430M), Slovakia ($388M), Czechia ($56.5M), Germany ($28.8M), and Sweden ($23M).
IMPORTS
In 2021, Poland imported $1.45B in Electricity. Poland imports Electricity primarily from: Germany ($911M), Sweden ($299M), Lithuania ($131M), Ukraine ($63.4M), and Czechia ($43.5M).That’s simply untrue. Nuclear reactors are permanently maintained and improved, especially in Germany because of §19a Atomgesetz.
Nuclear power plants can run 60 years and longer. The nuclear reactor in Beznau went first online 1969 and it’s still operational. The reactors Germany is shutting down now went online in 1988 and 1989.
See also: https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/whats-lifespan-nuclear-re...
Those reactors were never designed to operate this long. As time goes on, you'll run into increasingly rare failures which weren't even considered during their design. Getting replacement parts is going to become increasingly difficult, as you're now looking for a replacement for a one-off part which was created decades ago by a company which doesn't even exist anymore. And you're missing out on six decades of innovation - including safety improvements.
Running reactors well beyond their original design lifespan is irresponsible. We are already seeing this in practice in France: in 2022 28 out of 56 reactors were offline due to technical issues or maintenance. 2023 saw a repeat of this, with 32 out of 56 offline at the same time.
If you want a stable supply of power using nuclear reactors, you're going to have to build new ones sooner rather than later.
Most of our nuclear energy experts are already 50+. New generations are told that the industry is shrinking (unless you move to the forward-thinking PRC).
Also, it's better to be down for maintenance even for small issues than to play fast and loose. Nuclear safety regulations and agencies are generally well respected, and those frequent maintenance downtimes are a sign of that.
Similar to what is being attempted right now with chip production, you could of course try to spin up all of this infrastructure and the required workforce with a ton of public investment. But why do that when you can build perfectly workable solar/wind power plants in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost? Even if Germany would end up importing nuclear power from France, Poland, UK, Sweden, etc. why try to spend a boatload of money and political capital on an industry that those countries are positioned infinitely better to run? (Given all of these countries' problems with nuclear, I doubt that Germany will end up net importer, but that is beside the point).
If people were presenting Poland as the model for environmentalism then that strategy would likely raise even harsher criticism.
Except they didnt. Unlike Poland they reduced the amount of coal they used by rather a lot.
While US media is extremely critical of Germany for "not reducing its use of coal fast enough" it is apparently entirely unbothered by Poland not reducing it at all.
This is the American media feigning environmental concern because Germany was less obedient than Poland in following American foreign policy goals.
Well to be fair, this comment chain was explicitly about Germany. There are lots of bad energy policies.
Not for Japan[1]. The truth is that after Fukushima, the pro-nuclear parties lost a few state elections, which caused them to panic and give up on nuclear. Today, even Japan is over it, but in germany no one wants to admit that mistake.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan#Post-Fu...
It's the same reason Iran, Sweden and South Korea maintain a nuclear industry despite it not being particularly economic for any of them. They all have geopolitical concerns that drive them to want to be able to manufacture a nuke at short notice.
Unlike with Sweden, South Korea and Japan we are told to believe that Iran is pursuing nuclear power as a means of being able to acquire weapons.
Germany does not get on iota of good faith on that. They knew.
Politically hard to ignore? Yes.
Practicaly hard to ignore? No. Germany doesn't get any tsunamis and even if it did, the consequences of a fukushima level accident every few decades are less bad than the direct pollution effects of coal, even ignoring the CO2.
The next nuclear catastrophe probably won't look like Fukushima or Chernobyl but I imagine it will happen partly as a result of skimped/badly done maintenance on a plant whose operating life has been extended a bit too far.
That's pretty much Fukushima. It was an old plant, older than Chernobyl by 6 years by date of commissioning. It was supposed to shut down in early 2011, but was granted an eleventh-hour 10-year extension in February that year. The earthquake and tsunami happened a month later, in March.
Granted, it probably wouldn't actually have made any difference as it would have been operating that specific month, but it was still a bit of a "he was only 2 weeks from retirement" moment. Unless actions like moving the backup generators uphill would have been done beforehand if it was known the plant was going to keep going until 2021.
Separately, that $800B cleanup cost is something some dude pulled out of his arse. The actual latest government estimate was $200B.
Which is almost entirely due to the radiation panic. For example the permanent evacuation (and subsequent need to compensate everyone driven out of their homes) was almost entirely of people in areas were they had aless that 1% extra risk of cancer. And the managers of the decontamination do things like spend years dithering over whether to just release a bunch of contaminated water which would increase locals yearly radiation exposure by under 0.04%.
But lets take those costs as a given. The developed world has around a hundred commercial nuclear reactors and has done so for more around 50 years. The vast majority of disaster cleanup is Fukushima. An extra $2B factored into the cost of each plant to deal with accident chance chance isn't going to break the bank given these things produce around 500B kWh during their life time, which sells on the electricity market for around $50B.
It really does. If you remove the free insurance and let the plants shoulder the full cost it renders an already extremely expensive enterprise completely financially unviable. Thats why governments gave liability indemnification to plants in the first place.
The $800 billion is about more than cleanup costs, fwiw. It also includes stuff like turning on coal power plants to replace the power produced by the dead reactor. It wasnt Japan "overreacting".
All of this has happened before and it will happen again and because appropriately priced insurance WOULD break the bank taxpayers will be on the hook next time. Again.
The latest nuclear bill in America focused entirely on extending the legal lifetime of existing nuclear power plants. Good thing Fukushima's demise wasn't about its age, eh?
I think what enrages people is that unlike Poland, Germany is actively going in the wrong direction. They are stopping all nuclear power, not just closing old plants. All scientific evidence points to this being a terrible decision.
There's an expectation that Germany has the means and governance able enough to avoid taking disastrous decisions when it comes to fields which are almost entirely technical and non-political. So it was a shocking development, especially coming from a conservative majority that most people would assume would be generally pro nuclear.
Converting the entire electricity production of an advanced industrial economy to renewable energy (without using nuclear) is quite straightforward. In case of Germany, a 2015 study compared various scenarios for how electricity demand will develop by 2050. The most expansive scenario assumes a yearly demand of 800 TWh, compared to roughly 500 TWh in 2021. [1] The additional demand comes from electrifying cars and heating, etc.
Demand does of course vary by time of day, but is virtually stable from month to month. Variability of renewable production is quite high, so let's assume that you'd need long-term grid-scale electricity buffers for about 30% of yearly demand. The most basic approach to this would be the transformation of electricity and water into Hydrogen when an excess of electricity is available and the reverse when demand outstrips supply. The combined efficiency of that process (electricity->Hydrogen->electricity) is roughly 50%. I'm actually pretty sure that by 2050 we'll have much better solutions available, but this approach is doable with current tech and has the added bonus of being able to be combined with a hydrogen infrastructure similar to how natural gas is currently used, i.e. for industrial processes and heating.
That would put total yearly demand at 1,040 TWh, which based on the efficiency of currently available PV and wind turbines [2] would require a total nominal installed capacity of about 1.040 GW (based on real world data from Germany, 1 GW in installed renewable capacity is roughly equal to a yearly production of 1 TWh. This will vary based on local circumstances, but Germany is not particularly bountiful in its renewable potential compared to other countries).
Currently, Germany has a total installed capacity of solar, wind and water power generation of about 125GW but I will assume that all these installations will reach their end of life before 2050 and will need to be replaced as part of this project.
At current prices for the installation of new PV (700,000 €/MW) and wind onshore/offshore (3,000,000 €/MW) and assuming a 50/50 split in installed capacity, the total investment for the required 1,040 MW would come to roughly 2 Trillion Euros over 30 years, or about 66 Billion Euros per year.
Divided by 800 TWh of yearly demand, this comes out to 8.3 cents (Euro) per KWh. This is comfortably below the 2021 average whole sale price of roughly 10 cents/KWh and in Germany would come out to about 20 cents/KWh for private consumers, compared to the current market average of roughly 30 cents/KWh.
Of course current energy production is quite heavily subsidized by the German government. If subsidies continue (or taxes on electricity are lowered), price per KWh could be reduced substantially.
This is of course only a very rough and simplified calculation. But it is straightforward and based on real world data, a pessimistic energy consumption scenario and current technologies. It ignores the potential for geothermal energy, biomass, imported hydrogen, long-distance imports of solar energy from the Sahara, or hydro power from Northern Europe, as well as likely technological improvement for generating and storing renewable energy. Looking at this, I find it hard to believe that absent a complete revolution of reactor design and cost-effectiveness, nuclear power will have any serious role to play in this, given its regulatory challenges, capital expenditure requirements, construction times and unsolved waste management issues.
[1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2015/St... [2] https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten