Germany Quits Nuclear Power, Ending a Decades-Long Struggle
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany was reopening five power plants that burn lignite, a low-rank coal. Germany’s return to lignite demonstrates, yet again, the Iron Law of Electricity, which says that people, businesses, and governments will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.
Indeed, Germany’s move back to lignite is chock-full of contradictions, including one that belongs in the “you can’t make this up” column.
The Iron Law of Electricity is so powerful that the utility RWE is dismantling the Keyenberg wind project in the western part of the country to, wait for it... make more room for the expansion of the Garzweiler mine. Lignite from Garzweiler fuels the Neurath C power plant, which is one of the power plants being brought back online. A spokesperson for RWE told the Guardian newspaper that “We realize this comes across as paradoxical.”
Yes, there are paradoxes aplenty. Germany’s need to keep the lights on explains why the government is willing to ignore the fact that burning lignite to produce electricity emits more carbon dioxide than any other form of power generation.
Furthermore, burning lignite contradicts Germany’s climate goals. Under the country’s much-vaunted Energiewende (German for “energy turnaround”) Germany has pledged to slash its total greenhouse gas emissions by 95% by 2050. The cost of that pledge could total more than $500 billion by 2025 — and that figure only accounts for the investment needed to decarbonize the electricity sector. The result of all that spending is that residents of Germany are now paying some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.
Prematurely shutting down nuclear looks like a dumb decision, but Germany has been mismanaging their electric grid for decades.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267541/germany-monthly-...
Part of this discrepancy was them paying off an extremely premature investment in PV solar in attempt to kick start domestic production. Back in 2009 they setup 39 euro cents/kWh feed in tariffs for solar. Those subsidies where quickly cut on new installations but as I understand it they are still paying it on those early installs. The good news is those will be expiring fairly soon and arguably those initial investments are paying dividends in current rock bottom prices for new installations.
Also we don't know about all the nuclear accidents, do you mean all known civilian nuclear power plant accidents?
Certainly it’s in the ballpark.
We’d genuinely be better off ignoring most accidents and just using nuclear. Not to mention that coal ashes and emissions are chemically carcinogenic as well.
And best of all, more radioactive waste as well
Green party is really ruining and I'm amazed people still give them votes
Clarification: I'm not German. I'm talking globally and long term. What's happening right now in Germany is just a blip. The big picture:
> Clean power growth is likely to exceed electricity demand growth in 2023; this would be the first year for this to happen outside of a recession. With average growth in electricity demand and clean power, we forecast that 2023 will see a small fall in fossil generation (-47 TWh, -0.3%), with bigger falls in subsequent years as wind and solar grow further. That would mean 2022 hit “peak” emissions. A new era of falling power sector emissions is close.
https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electrici...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2022/10/28/the-iron...
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2023/03...
Actually not every way though.. nuclear waste has to go somewhere.
I don't understand your argument; of course waste must go somewhere. Nuclear power, with its waste, is still cleaner than fossil fuels in every way.
My stock comment for that is: bury it deep and with signs; if we've lost the ability to read the signs, we've lost the ability to dig deep and endanger ourselves.
No, we've got a pretty good idea.
>So I don't think it's demonstrably cleaner "in every way".
It is, objectively.
Nuclear waste has killed possibly a few hundred people at best.
Not if we store it properly, like we already do.
Take into consideration the burning of fossil fuels over a very long period of time. Billions.
yes, and it's so dense that it fits in a ridiculous amount of space, unlike coal that will put cancer-causing dusts everywhere in the air for decades to come. Enjoy.
That does not mean the plan has to be followed through without amendment today - in fact, it cannot be, unless restarting lignite-burning generators was part of the original plan. Responsibility for this development lies squarely on all those who chose this path today (and regardless of party affiliation.)
So they were populists?
> Yet the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 caused German sentiments to shift strongly against atomic energy once more, and Ms. Merkel abruptly reversed course. Her government passed a law to phase out Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors by the end of 2022.
Similarly in the neighbouring Austria, nuclear power is prohibited in the constitution, not by a political party.
Which is funny, because we actually built a pretty much complete nuclear power plant, Zwentendorf. It‘s now a unique museum.
A vote of just 50.47 % ruined our radiant future...
Also we do have one research reactor left right in the city. I was blessed enough to visit it once.
There really should be a rule that important decisions can't pass with a tiny majority
There are at least two major problems with such a rule:
(1) On an important question, “yes” and “no” are both important decisions.
(2) Who decides what is “important”?
You can make a rule that is closer to “you can’t make specific kinds of deviations from the status quo without a supermajority vote”, but that’s…very different from “important decisions”.
Bad politicians ask people how they should do a thing, then do that thing.
It's been awhile since Germany has had good politicians where energy is concerned.
Then they did away with a big component of "Plan A" in nuclear after Fukushima, which promoted Russian gas to an essential component of their transition energy mix.
At the end of the day, if Germany hadn't stopped building nuclear or decommissioned reactors, Ukraine probably wouldn't have been invaded.
Russia surely nudged, but if Germany hadn't already been trending in that direction then it wouldn't have stuck.
Putin invaded Ukraine because he wanted to, and Germany had nothing to do with that.
The belief that Germany would rather sacrifice Ukraine than lose Russian gas would have been less plausible if 30% nuclear energy had been retained.
Russia didn't make a rational decision: we know that Putin hid the plan from most of his subordinates, ignored concerns presented by the rest, and the system withheld important facts from him likewise. He made a huge gamble with his "3-day special operation".
Also, the nuclear plants would have provided only a partial backup for the Russian gas, as electricity from the plants couldn't replace the direct use of gas in German houses and industry anyway.
A bad one, because their facts were wrong, but one based off calculations rather than rolling dice:
+ Russian Cold War-era (and refits of same) military materiel is reaching obsolescence and end of life. Russia can't afford to modernize its military at scale (hence the obsession with announcing prototype superweapons)
+ US and European ties are at a low point, as a consequence of the Trump presidency
+ US is focused on China as a peer threat
+ Germany is uniquely diplomatically vulnerable to gas energy pressure, but only until additional renewables come online, transmission infrastructure is upgraded, and efficiency measures implemented (see the Nord Stream bombing whodoneit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sa... )
+ Remaining ex-Warsaw Pact / non-NATO countries are likely accede to NATO in the next few years (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO#Current_... )
... ergo, there was no better time to make the attempt than now. Everyone just assumed Putin wouldn't be stupid enough to try.
But that calculation looks very different without the energy vulnerability, as Russia understands the economic difference between themselves and Germany.
I agree with this, but this in no way absolves the CDU. If they try to undercut another parties support and pass legislation with negative effects, it's their fault, not the fault of the party they undercut.
> But ultimately this is on the German voting public, a large portion of whom have had an irrational aversion to nuclear for a long time.
Aside from whether I agree with the aversion being irrational, this is definitely true. The CDU was following public sentiment.
It's incredibly naive, but it's the same mentality in present day nuclear opponents. They still fail to see that a no to nuclear is often a yes to coal, oil and gas.
The thing is, this was a widely supported decision that has by and large gone through without a lot of opposition in a country that reliably votes for conservatives and moderates to lead them. Also, none of the bad stuff that people predicted would happen has actually happened. No blackouts. No massive increase in coal/gas usage. None of that seems to be happening.
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/15-millionen-tonnen-mehr-co2-...
People should focus more on outcomes of policies and not their favorite tech. If they'd do that it would be easy to see that nuclear has existed for 70 years and it has failed to replace fossil fuels worldwide in a meaningful way. To me it's obvious the costs are prohibitive and this is unlikely to change. It hasn't thus far. If someone can get it done, by all means, but it hasn't happened. Instead we hear about small modular which was already tried in the 80s because of the high upfront investments of large plants, but those turned out not to work because of even higher per MWh costs. So it was back to huge plants which again turned out to be difficult to build. I am seeing a pattern here.
Renewables are accomplishing a lot more and a lot faster and there's no need to waste resources on something else. If they can't get us to 100% they can get us as fast as possible to whatever is possible. And thus far all the predictions on what is realistic for renewables as a percentage of the grid have failed dramatically.
Now imagine how much lower it would be had they kept the nuclear plants.
1) possession of a crystal ball to view an alternative reality 2) certainty that there is no dependence between spending money on nuclear and other things
I don't think that 2) is true. The disposal of existing nuclear waste will cost the tax payers over €100B [1] and sometimes it's better to make a hard cut so people can focus on the future and not the past. Either way, it's been successful.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d...
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-sees-ti...
Not in Germany
But voters have a short term memory and will blame it all on the current administration.
But all the big parties and their politicians had a hand in the current desaster, people are quit right to blame all the last 25 years' governments.
What happened is that the subsidies for renewable energy in Germany mostly led to a buildup of a huge photovoltaic industry in China after an initial goldrush in Europe. When they changed the incentive scheme, the German photovoltaic industry crumbled and the chinese one was kept afloat with local subsidies.
For a while, the equipment suppliers in Europe still profited from the boom in China, but where eventually replaced by Chinese ones. In effect, now both the photovoltaic industry and the equipment industry in Europe largely disappeared.
And to add insult to injury, China is considering to limit photovoltaic exports (potentially as a means to counter the semiconductor sacntions):
https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3208206/chinas-propose...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291750/carbon-intensity...
Which for some countries means blaming the greens in the current government even though they were absent from previous governments from the last 15 years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291750/carbon-intensity...
Next up for phase out, Coal.
I would until recently have bet that Germany would phase out Coal before the USA, but the recent IRA changes might have made it a competitive race again.
Germany will shut down its three remaining nuclear reactors by April 16, ending nuclear power generation in Europe's largest economy. Germany's move, which marks the end of a decades-long fight by environmentalists, makes it an outlier in much of the industrialised world, including Britain, France, Finland, and Poland, which are expanding their nuclear energy programs as part of their plans to reach ambitious climate targets. The decision comes at a time when Europe is grappling with the question of how to secure enough energy to drive its economies and keep homes warm while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Some scientists and Nobel Prize laureates from across the globe have urged Germany to reconsider its decision to phase out nuclear power, citing it as a valuable alternative to power plants spewing greenhouse gases. However, Robert Habeck, the economy minister, insists that Germany can manage the nuclear exit, stating that the country's energy system will be structured differently, relying on 80% renewable energies by 2030.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2022/10/28/the-iron...
Longer term, a switch to 100% renewables is planned, which is supposed to take 20 years. However, plans are coming along too slowly, especially regarding storage and transmission lines. But also necessary ramp-up of wind and solar installations is extremely lacking. Meanwhile power prices are at an all-time high and no betterment in sight. Meanwhile a switch to mostly-electric transportation, green steel smelting, green concrete production, and mostly electric heating should happen, which will roughly triple electricity consumption overall.
So I guess we'll wait and see, most probably more of the imported whatever-we-can-get at stellar prices.
How are they gonna do it, by exterminating 50% of the population?
- 33% coal - 11% natural gas - 24% wind - 11% solar - 6% nuclear
Nuclear was already winding down with only 6% in 2022. Medium term renewables are growing and will replace it, short term coal and gas.
The economic potential wasted in this country over the past ~30 years by shortsighted political self-sabotage is almost hilarious.
And after 50 years of sub-replacement fertility, now we'll get wrecked even harder by what's going to happen with this graphic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/med...
Of course, it all comes so suddenly...
No, its not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/13/germany-r...