Germany begins powering down its last three nuclear plants
npr.org
npr.org
Environmental groups planned to mark the day with celebrations outside the three reactors and rallies in major cities, including Berlin.”
It’s crazy that a country made up of seemingly smart people favor this. How did Germany evolve to be so anti-nuclear? Given the alternatives nuclear seems the way to go.
https://www.rwe.com/en/press/rwe-power/2023-01-11-five-villa...
Here's a 100% renewables plan for Germany that involves building gas capacity of 60% of peak demand and using it and synthetic gas made with renewables as "storage":
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585c3439be65942f022bb...
They also provide numbers for doing it just with batteries, and suggest it would only be 2x as expensive. The numbers are a few years old now, so prices and tech have moved on since.
Other people now suggest massive oversupply of wind and solar combined with mass EV rollout will make it cheaper to just use batteries, which I generally lean towards:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/585c3439be65942f022bb...
But either way, it's not unexpected or weird to build gas capacity when trying to wean yourself of fossil fuels and energy imports. What's important is details like how much you use, whether you capture the carbon, and how you source the gas and whether you are rolling out renewables, heat pumps and EVs sufficiently fast.
Germany is not going to reach the European climate goals if they continue with building new natural gas power plants. They will also not reach the Paris agreement. It is "a bad thing" to continue burning fossil fuels!
There is a lot of technology that exists and future tech that they could be using. The German has instead chosen to use fossil fuels. If we are discussing what they could be doing, what they could make a political decision that when they ban production of new fossil fuel cars they also ban the construction of new fossil fuel power plants. This would be much more real than politician talking about solar and wind while at the same time building tons of natural gas power plants in the backyard.
https://www.equinor.com/news/20230105-equinor-rwe-cooperatio...
> Construction of new gas power plants (CCGTs), contributing to Germany’s phase-out roadmap for coal. Equinor and RWE will jointly own the CCGTs which initially will be fueled with natural gas and then gradually use hydrogen as fuel with the ambition of fully to be run on hydrogen when volumes and technology are available.
> Building production facilities in Norway to produce low carbon hydrogen from natural gas with CCS. More than 95 percent of the CO2 will be captured and stored safely and permanently under the seabed offshore Norway.
> Export of hydrogen by pipeline from Norway to Germany.
> Joint development of offshore wind farms that will enable production of renewable hydrogen as fuel for power and other industrial customers in the future.
The plans for carbon capture is also very far into the future, more likely to have a significant role in next century than this one. The only party that talks a lot of carbon capture is the fossil fuel industry, and according to them they would need around 150 billions in government subsidizes in order create the technology.
In both cases the cost is overwhelming too high. No one is investing into this except for government funded trial run. The ambition is obviously to use it in the future(tm). That sounds nice and is something politicians use, but its a fantasy if people think it will actually be used to reach the climate goals of 2030.
side note Language like "You seem to be intentionally missing the point" is pointless. You insult me, I insult you, it will just sound like children talking. Please skip it. If you have to address the author rather than the content, then simply don't write anything.
The experts involved in that project was asked this winter if and when they expected to see green hydrogen in the European energy grid in order to replace natural gas, and their reply was around 2080 and earliest 2050 before any hydrogen energy will be burned in order to generate electricity. It takes a lot of time to build up production, storage and pipelines, and even longer to go from small scale experiments to full industry scale. The current technology is still much more expensive than natural gas when producing hydrogen, estimated to be about 10% more per unit even after you include tax rebates and green credits. Their project wouldn't have been started unless they had received those government subsidizes, and the news reporting on it are predicting that the final price tag for the government will be a few hundred millions before its fully up and running.
But lets ignore that and look at the European Commission climate package in 2021. For the small price of €2 trillions of European subsidies then maybe in 2050 we would see the European grid being supply with enough hydrogen to make a difference in the climate goals. That was however before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a lot of the money intended to go into renewables energy has instead gone to pay for even more fossil fuels. Since then there hasn't been much talk about those trillions intended to be invested in green hydrogen, nor much proof that it was anything more than just talk.
Political talk is cheap.
Large scale production is slated to happen before the end of the decade: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64538296
Everything seems to be happening way faster than what you are claiming.
If we are going to use press released by experimental prototypes funded by government research grants, then why stop at green hydrogen. Fusion is already here! Here is an article from last year showing how they already produced energy from fusion ignition: https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieve...
H2 Green Steel, the competitor to Hybrit want to get in with the government subsidies, and as a strategy they are pushing a more optimistic time table. The first buildings however have yet to go up on the remote site, which is a subtle hint that there is some politics involved. 2 years to build and construct a full scale production foundry, and the wind/solar farms, and the hydrogen production facility, and the storage, and the pipelines, and so on might be just a touch unrealistic. (this is the second link you gave)
Also a bit darker thought, but you’d think the chance of nuclear fallout zones that’d keep humans out would be adored by more hardcore environmentalists.
I think the sort of environmentalism on display there is more people rallying against what they don’t “comprehend”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...
We have not yet found a geologically suitable site in Germany. In contrast to the less disturbed granites of Finland and Sweden, the formations occurring in Germany are more fractured and thus less suitable. Currently, several salt and clay blocks are being investigated for their suitability as repositories, but they have other problems. (Water solubility for salt and lower stability for clay).
"According to the report of the Repository Commission, the final disposal of highly radioactive waste in Germany will drag on well into the 22nd century. The commission expects the end of emplacement to occur between the years 2075 and 2130, while the "state of a sealed repository mine should be reached between 2095 and 2170 or later." Accordingly, highly radioactive waste could be housed in interim storage facilities until after 2100. At the same time, final storage costs are projected to range from about 49 billion to 170 billion euros; significantly more than the 23 billion euros in payments transferred by nuclear power plant operators to the government for this purpose on July 3, 2017."
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlager_(Kerntechnik)#Weltwei...
The very big problem is that at the same time particularly southern German states fail to support renewables and power distribution lines.
So while there was a time line. One part of the time line was missed. So everyone decided to rather count on Russian gas as an intermediary solution with the known geopolitical consequences that followed.
PS: Strange twist: There is a German company that now wants to produce fuel elements for Russian nuclear power plants...
Only from an old-school deeply irrational fear of nuclear energy perspective. Now that we know how catastrophic climate change could be the rational choice would be to replace all coal and gas with nuclear. Germans also really need to understand just how critical cheap and reliable electricity is to quality of life and GDP. Germany is making very bad decisions for deeply ideological reasons divorced from any understanding of real world technological limitations.
The time line was never realistic.
Dig a deep hole, put waste there. This problem has been solved for decades. Germany has no seismic activity either, so that should not be a problem there.
It's not true that Germany has no seismic activity btw.
Remember they still censor video games? Or are afraid of Google Street View?
They should be celebrating right next ash heaps from coal power plants
The biggest problem I personally have with nuclear energy is that I don't trust companies nor states to deal with radioactive substances responsibly, especially with a rapidly aging population (see also https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko ). Do you? Theoretical safety is irrelevant when it comes to people. Just think about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accide...
Climate change activists opposing nuclear energy is like firefighters opposing water.
That is exactly my point. If humanity was sane and rational I wouldn't be concerned about nuclear energy, because I would trust organizations to deal with it. But I do not trust organizations to handle this. In countries with vast space radioactive waste management might be negligible, but in Europe contamination affects more people immediately.
> Climate change activists opposing nuclear energy is like firefighters opposing water.
No, it's more like firefighters opposing AFFF. https://www.drugwatch.com/news/2021/02/22/firefighters-file-...
What poor timing, too. With the war in Ukraine going on, now is not the time to be increasing your independence on fossil fuels, even if temporarily.
The German reactors were running on low maintenance because of the shutdown, anticipated for last December. Hence the risk of continued operation is worse than typical.
A large overhaul would be necessary to ensure usual safety.
Of course the question is if the reactors could have been „saved“ earlier on, but those decisions were made in 2010.
In the meantime, wind, solar and gas plants were built. Gas plants were intended to offset low output times in solar and wind. Gas plants can be quickly turned on and off unlike nuclear plants. Thats the reasoning.
What would you recommend?
Nuclear power is currently by far the most expensive way to generate electricity. And this despite the fact that the insurance sum for the power plants is capped and the remaining risk is assumed by the state and the money that was invested for final waste storage will predictably not be sufficient either. Our early attempts for final storage since the 60s have failed and since 2013 we have been planning how to recover hundreds of thousands of barrels from a salt mine from which radioactively contaminated brine is leaking. And we have yet to find a suitable repository where long-term safety can be guaranteed.
Well Germany isn't a country of smart people. Was maybe, now it's just a country for crackpot bureaucrats and corrupt politicians.
Principally nuclear countries like Finland, France, and Sweden produce a kWh of power with 5x-20x less carbon emissions. The figures are even better in countries relying more on hydro energy.
The nuclear waste is a real problem, but a nearly inconsequential one compared to global warming and carbon emissions from coal and natural gas. We have geological storage and reprocessing methods for nuclear waste. Fast Breeder Reactors and Molten Salt Reactors can consume what's considered nuclear waste and the latter can produce short-lived waste (dangerous for 300 years instead of thousands), which we can definitely store.
The biggest challenges for nuclear reactors are political, both because people are against the reactors as they were unsafe/used for WMD production in the past, and because having nuclear energy tips the energy and power balance (countries like Russia would rather see Europe depending on their energy). The engineering and safety challenges are irrelevant in comparison.
… doesn't in any way change the fact that Germany has indeed been massively investing in renewable energies and has built up enormous capacities in that domain that account for a much higher percentage of renewables in the energy mix than the overwhelming majority of developed countries… and that those early and continuous massive investments by Germany have played a major role in bringing these renewable energies to the much improved viability, maturity and price level they now have.
There is no contradiction between those two facts.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-and-gdp-per...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-emissions-and-gdp-per...
And, apart from a covid blip, generally looks positive for most economies, and France and Germany don't seem much different, despite the differences in their electricity production.
Another view on similar data:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity?tab=chart&t...
Such ban would go well in hand with the decision to phase out cars that run on fossil fuels in 2035.
YOu understand that Germany has been investing into wind and solar for decades by now and it's still extremely far from meeting its energy production goals, even though you wind farms everywhere in the country when you drive there? That should tell you something about the viability of this initiative.
If you really believed the science on the seriousness of Climate Change, you would see that powering down existing nuclear plants is one of the stupidest things you could do. Even a Chernobyl every decade would be preferable to the consequences of increased CO2 output.
Nuclear is better than FF, but not without associated long-term burdens. (Trading nuclear for FFs would be dumb.)
The goal has to be to get off FF as fast as possible, with an emphasis on reducing imports.
by keeping the nuclear for a few more years they could have phased out the coal instead
and making it ever worse: that coal is lignite, the shittiest possible coal
it's hard to overstate quite how stupid Germany is here
the German foreign secretary at the time, Heiko Maas