The end of nuclear power in Germany | Hacker News Reader

The end of nuclear power in Germany

greenpeace.org

37 pointshochmartinez148 comments

Greenpeace celebrates during record profits for the German coal industry. [0] Germany (6th largest coal reserve in the world) becomes a net exporter of electricity to nuclear France just as "electricity became as polluting as power produced in South Africa and India" [1]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/toaster/v2/charts/4d971e78dafc471b...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-22/germany-r...

The problem with Germany's coal is that it's mostly lignite, the lowest quality and dirtiest type of coal. At least the UK lucked out on having the best quality coal.

1. The reason Germany has to scale (temporarily) on coal wasn't the exit from nuclear power. It's because Germany stopped importing russian gas.

2. Why does France need to import electricity in the first place? Hint: It's because HALF of their nuclear reactors needed maintenance.

... and killing nuclear is apparently more important than not using coal.

Pathetic, not a single mention of how this premature phasing out of nuclear power has increased use of coal power in Germany, resulting in higher carbon emissions.

Greenpeace is a disgrace. It's well known that Russia has supported various anti-nuclear environmental movements in Europe to keep countries dependent on their gas supply.

> Greenpeace is a disgrace. It's well known that Russia has supported various anti-nuclear environmental movements in Europe to keep countries dependent on their gas supply.

Far right movements, okay but do you have any source on Russia supporting anti-nuclear environmental movements in Europe ?

edit: I found this question https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-9-2022-00127... from a Polish member of the parliament but the answer is... disconcertingly vague.

Deep ecology and luddite environmentalism are far right movements. They're adjacent to "trads." They just haven't realized it yet, nor have most of their detractors.

That's a point of view, not an argument nor a source.

Coal-fired power in Germany declined right along with nuclear. The idea that nuclear was replaced with coal is false, and it's been debunked so much that anyone continuing to propagate the falsehood is deliberately lying.

There is yet another aspect to this: the radiation hazard of coal which is often cited applies to black coal to a much higher degree than to brown coal, which is the kind that Germany tends to burn, and it's not as if that ash tends to be released into the environment either. A lot of money has gone into the scrubbing of the exhaust of coal fired plants.

Still less of those would be better.

Totally not true: coal burning plants were re-opened in Germany, mining for lignite expanded. Here's some non-lying data from before things got even worse: https://jancovici.com/en/energy-transition/societal-choices/... Then for the period after 2021: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/energy-crisis-fu...

I was talking about the decade after 2010 when coal and nuclear were both falling in Germany. The current Ukraine-inspired changes are temporary.

> It's well known that Russia

That's not well known. I wouldn't say it's impossible, Russia plays all kind of games. But do you have any sources?

BTW atomic fuel export from Russia is not sanctioned and does continue. Just this weekend a transport went via Helsinki airport. The destination was not disclosed, but I guess one could find out on flightradar24? The direction points to some Western country.

It's a well known rumour what Russia supports these groups.

Anyway, the people who claim these rumours always make it look like these groups exist only because Russia funds them which is a conveinent POV when West stronk, russkies bad!

Russia is a major nuclear power user and will happily build a nuclear power plant in your country of choice.

They’re also one of the major sources of Uranium.

Powerful ideas have long tailed effects. The nuclear panic that crested with Chernobyl has been embedded deeply in the public consciousness, and we have not seen its end yet. The science of climate change has not yet had an emotional connection with the populace, so when Greenpeace says they've killed nuclear in Germany they hear "nuclear catastrophe averted", when they should hear "we love to see more coal burned, more radiation released, and accelerate climate change".

Is the fear of nuclear really higher in Germany? Lots of places are wary of nuclear but Germany proactively shutting down all plants goes the furthest.

I live in Germany but am not German. I don't think there's more fear here, compared to the other places I know.

You might say there's a coalition. Several kinds of opposition adding up.

For example, all of the nuclear operators were caught discarding nuclear waste at a construction site some years ago, without either permission or records. The site was supposed to become a storage site, but throwing nuclear waste before it's opened, in places where construction workers will have to work later, and not keeping records? The episode lost trust with the engineering-friendly part of the audience.

If anyone were to seriously suggest building a new plant here, the cost overruns of Hinkley Point C would be a large problem, because another part of the public is really stingy about the public purse.

And so on. It's not all fear of nuclear accidents, it's more of a coalition.

Indeed. If nuclear really were the economic bee's knees, as the nuclear stans keep saying, the opposition could be bought off and corners wouldn't have to be cut. But nuclear is way too expensive and that corrodes support.

> The episode lost trust with the engineering-friendly part of the audience.

This still sounds like an emotional response. We need to keep in mind that coal based energy emits more radioactive matter at a larger scale then nuclear.

The only difference is that the trash from nuclear is easy to handle and store.

It seems like we implicitly still subscribe the the saying that "The solution to pollution is dilution" – we rather want to dilute our radioactive waste in the air than to put it is manageable containers or leaving it on construction sites.

> We need to keep in mind that coal based energy emits more radioactive matter at a larger scale then nuclear.

I’ve heard that too. Are you sure that this comparison is taking into account radioactive waste at all, rather than just comparing direct emissions into the environment during normal operation?

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/do-coal-fired-power-sta...

it seems like these number include _everything_ also the "nuclear waste in a barrel" radiation emissions.

I don't think it's an emotional response… it's saying "even if nuclear can be done safely, I just don't trust <list of scandal participants> to do it".

When you employ a worse form a energy generation than nuclear because of your response to said scandals then you are acting emotionally and not by the knowledge available.

Well, it's not my personal opinion, so I don't suppose I care that deeply… but I confess I'm curious.

The insurance company that insured the building I live in sent a letter a couple of years ago, saying that after the string of water leak problems we've had, our insurance premiums would more than double. In effect judging our insurance risk by the number and cost of our past problems. I suspect you won't describe that judgment as emotional.

But when people judge a power company by its past safety record, you describe that as emotional. Why? What's the difference? What makes one judgment emotional and the other not? What does "emotional" mean?

No, you are right. that in fact happened, and the insurance company set the new premium based on imperics not emotions.

my point is, that the "insurance premiums" we have to pay now are significantly higher because we did not employ nuclear on a larger scale 50 years ago.

to stay in analogy: you had the choice of choosing another piping system that would have decreased your insurance premiums, but didn't based on an motional response.

what we forget to factor in is the enormous tax we have to pay now and the coming years due to the decision of not employing nuclear: infrastructure to manage higher water levels. climate migration issues, energy dependency issues, you name it.

and that tax we have to pay due to an emotional response.

The question is then, "Can these corruption/mismanagement prone entities be reformed to reduce the risk?"

I don't think even a 10,000 person strong web of nuclear anti-corruption and safety organisations would be 1% as expensive as the additional costs due to buying more gas from Russia, let alone the climate impact costs.

The problem is that these bodies are set up to have a commercial incentive to minimise costs and low probability of detecting poor procedure. I'm not sure if German culture can break the natural hierarchical tendencies (don't contradict superiors, don't report bad news), but probably better chance than in the US (where you'll lose your job and health insurance, and get blacklisted and possibly sued and criminally convicted, if you become a whistle blower).

No, Germany does not go the furthest. Other countries have quit nuclear long ago, e.g. Italy closed all plants in 1990 following a 1987 referendum, i.e. 33 years before Germany. Similarly Lithuania. Denmark already decided in the 1980ies not to build new plants.

Denmark is probably the strongest, having never built any nuclear power plants and originating those "Atomkraft? Nej tak!" stickers you still see all over Europe.

https://www.atomkraftnejtak.dk/

Dunno for others but Lithuania had the closure of Ignalina NPP as a condition to EU ascession.

Also, that was the same type of reactors as in Chernobyl.

It kind of made sense.

Shutting down the old Soviet reactors definitely makes sense. Small countries maintaining a nuclear industry doesn't make sense. But engineering powerhouses like Germany (or France) maintaining a nuclear capability, and keeping reliable plants operating, is very different.

> climate change has not yet had an emotional connection

So. I see people around me in climate agony, with one (very smart) friend saying he doesn't want to have any children because of climate misery they will experience.

I, as it happened, have sadly have paid little attention to the numbers side of climate things. So, with the climate change being a widely acknowledged disaster and an unimaginable catastrophe, how would it affect Germany?

If you paid attention to the numbers side of things, you'd know that there is no climate catastrophe. That's mass hysteria talking, not anything scientifically grounded. Your friend is unfortunately therefore educated but maybe not that smart, if he's really in agony over this stuff. If he was smart he'd double check these claims thoroughly before making a life decision as big as not having children (assuming he really does want them).

How so? It seems that the IPCC models have been quite accurate, and that we're on track for the more pessimistic paths. Can you explain how the numbers show that this is not true?

Not at all! The IPCC models have come under very heavy criticism even from the more moderate climatologists, partly because the scenario that gets regularly referred to as "business as usual" (RCP8.5) in fact makes many extreme assumptions that deviate strongly from current practice. RCP 8.5 gets more than half of scenario references in the latest IPCC report, yet even the BBC has had to accept that it's unrealistic:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-51281986

The worst-case scenario for emissions of CO2 this century is no longer plausible, say researchers. Referred to as "business as usual", the scenario assumes a 500% increase in the use of coal, which is now considered unlikely.

[...]

Very few scientists realised that RCP8.5 was originally a 90th percentile outcome, not a most likely or business-as-usual outcome. They assumed too much, when they should perhaps have checked, say the authors of the review.

"How many of your average climate scientists know the nuances of RCP8.5? It would certainly be interesting to know."

The media, taking their steer from scientists, have tended to use the highest impacts when reporting on projections based on emissions scenarios.

A 500% increase in anything is not "business as usual" by definition, yet the IPCC and the various journalists and NGOs in its orbit have for years regularly reported it as such and used it to gin up reports of a non-existent crisis. Consider whether an institution that describes a scenario of massive change as "business as usual" can be trusted and what that means for their other claims.

The BBC describes this as a "communications cockup" in which scientists merely didn't realize the assumptions of the scenario they were talking about. But such "cockups" occur regularly and are simply not plausible.

If you really dig into this supposed crisis, it's always like this. The assumptions are absurd, unfounded or invalidated, the data is presented as precise but the error bars are massive and a million other things. You don't hear about it outside of forums like this one because the people who benefit from the population believing in an endless crisis have made it taboo to point out what they're doing.

If I understand you correctly, your gripe here is with the name of the worst scenario, because you believe that:

> A 500% increase in anything is not "business as usual" by definition

I have two questions here:

1) why is a 500% increase in coal usage "not business as usual by definition"? What is the definition you're going off, and why does it not fit? "Business as usual" doesn't mean "everything as it is right now", it means "continuing on the current trajectory". If there was a definitive trend of increased coal usage, how would a 500% increase fall out of the definition of "business as usual"?

2) this is a gripe you have with communication, but it's actually not really relevant to what I asked. Do you have a specific answer for my initial question? An example could be that you show the prognosticated change in temperature, and show that current data falls completely out of it.

https://www.iea.org/news/the-world-s-coal-consumption-is-set...

Global coal use is set to rise by 1.2% in 2022, surpassing 8 billion tonnes in a single year for the first time and eclipsing the previous record set in 2013, according to Coal 2022, the IEA’s latest annual market report on the sector. Based on current market trends, the report forecasts that coal consumption will then remain flat at that level through 2025 as declines in mature markets are offset by continued robust demand in emerging Asian economies

That was 2022, a year in which Europe had to increase coal usage for the first time in a long time due to exploding natural gas pipelines and Germany shutting down nuclear power. Even in that extreme and unprecedented situation, the world managed only a 1.2% increase in coal usage. In other years coal usage fell or was flat. A 500% increase is a fantasy and everyone who looks at it for even a split second knows it.

The complaint isn't the name of the worst case scenario. That's just an example. This scenario is routinely used as the basis for "climate crisis" claims, so it's not merely a naming issue either. The complaint is about the overall duplicity and manipulative nature of what this field produces.

>> An example could be that you show the prognosticated change in temperature, and show that current data falls completely out of it.

https://i0.wp.com/judithcurry.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04...

But bear in mind that even this sort of graph can be misleading, because it assumes the relation between temperature and the effect on the climate is understood. It actually isn't.

BTW, you say "it's actually not really relevant to what I asked" but you originally said "we're on track for the more pessimistic paths" and it was meant to show that although this claim is often made, it's not really right. The more pessimistic path is implausible and has been for a long time.

> they hear "nuclear catastrophe averted", when they should hear "we love to see more coal burned, more radiation released, and accelerate climate change".

I don't think either of those are necessarily true. It could very well be that Greenpeace sees nuclear as a vestige of the non-renewable past and that they wish to remove hindrances that slow down the further acceptance of the fact that we will have to bet heavily on renewables if we are to make it out of this. The problem with strawmen of your own making is that they can be cut down by others just as easily as you could do so yourself. Greenpeace is obviously not pro-coal and the resulting release in radiation, they would have much rather seen that instead of building these nuclear plants in the first place the money that went into them had gone into renewables instead, which would have had a more positive impact on climate change in the longer term. Besides, coal isn't the only replacement fuel for the drop in nuclear capacity, which wasn't all that large to begin with so this is a bit of a FUD argument, especially given that after the studies that showed the amount of radioactivity released through fly ash there have been substantial efforts made to contain the exhaust and capture the fly ash (electrostatically, for instance).

But the pro-nuclear faction is now equating less nuclear with more coal in an attempt to greenwash nuclear power. Chernobyl was as good as it gets for an accident of that scale, Fukushima closed the door as far as Germany was concerned. And France is an accident away from having a real problem because they are quite dependent on nuclear power and if the tide ever turns there they will have a real problem catching up.

Germany, meanwhile has a pretty high percentage of renewables already:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

And given the amount of funds they are pumping into renewables they may well end up ahead of their schedule (in part due to the drop in Russian natural gas).

If anything here in NL the war in Ukraine has given a massive impetus to the transition from fossil to renewables and I hope the effect of that lasts long enough to get us to the finish line.

It is fair enough to argue that Greenpeace in fact want renewables. However, that should be seen as an energy conservatism direction.

The energy production needed to be supplied is not todays need, but the need of a future where we don't want to dig up oil.

This means that jet fuels need to be produced by sequestration and all transport needs to powered by electricity (or fuel from sequestration).

We also want a future where most of the land is not occupied as farm land and is more wild. This requires indoor farming techniques – again extremely energy intensive.

In the end we should plan for a world that uses a lot more energy than today.

As renewables scale roughly linear to land it is by many not seen as a feasible alternative, as it wouldn't be able to supply 10x the need of today (which it will already struggle with).

In the end: Greenpeaces argument only works if they believe that we are at the end of technological development.

I think Greenpeace is more of a political organization these days than an activist organization, and it exists mostly to perpetuate itself and raise more funds. That said, they are found on the long term 'right' side of most of these arguments and a lot of their numerical work on the real cost of nuclear power has proven to be accurate in the longer term (even if at the time it seemed a bit pessimistic). This alone should qualify them to see the achievement of shutting down nuclear power as a major milestone for their organization as something of the end of an era. They worked - especially in the past - quite hard to achieve this goal.

I remember when Greenpeace was a bunch of guys and girls and an old boat that they painted over because they cared about the whales. Such idealism is a necessity in order to provide some balance in a world where business tends to dominate over social and long term welfare issues. In that sense they succeeded where many others have failed, their voice has added a lot of weight to various issues and has measurably increased awareness of many environmental issues.

To present their effort as having the opposite effect isn't really productive, it clearly isn't their goal nor does it match with any statement that they have made or even a realistic assessment of the technical situation. And that's what makes these arguments so annoying, it's just gamesmanship, it elevates winning the game to a higher level than that it does our long term survival.

Massive renewables + a viable storage option is clearly the way forward, anything else is just money games by vested interests.

As for jet fuels: I think the age of the jet will come to an end at some point and I'm not at all going to mourn that. It was a luxury that we probably couldn't afford and don't actually need all that much. Travel should be time consuming and expensive because if it isn't we will move around so much that the planet will suffer dis-proportionally. Maybe we'll see another round of boats or maybe a slower form of air travel, I really don't know. But the idea that you hop on a plane at 7 in the morning, are in Barcelona at 9:30, attend a meeting, have lunch and fly back has so much wrong with it that I much prefer our current COVID incentivized world of video conferencing.

Actions speak louder than words and good intentions don't justify bad actions.

> As for jet fuels: I think the age of the jet will come to an end at some point

This is fair, you argue within a framework where we have seen the technological peak – something I don't think you will meet to much sympathy for in the forum.

As such, this is also where this conversation stops – you can't build a house without the foundation.

> something I don't think you will meet to much sympathy for in the forum.

As if I care.

> As such, this is also where this conversation stops – you can't build a house without the foundation.

Well, you decided to join it, you're entirely free to back out any time you want. But the house has a foundation, it just isn't going to be in the color that you want. Power will likely be variably priced depending on what time or day or season it is and whether that future arrives 10 years from now or 50 doesn't really matter, it will arrive regardless because non-proliferation alone will stop the world to adopt nuclear power en masse.

It’s a very touching statement but the number of flights even with a pandemic returned to the 2015 levels contradicts your thesis.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-...

Yes, of course they did. But this isn't the long term just yet and when fuel prices here were quite a bit higher a few months ago the effects on mobility were very noticeable.

So I take that as a harbinger of what's to come, and in we don't actually know how high those levels would be if COVID had not happened and I suspect quite a bit higher than they are today. Videoconferencing has replaced in person meetings for us in all but the rarest cases.

I acknowledge that the jet industry it’s quite sensible to the fuel prices, but from that point jump that the industry its going to an end sound quite far fetched.

Unless that you live in China or Europe that has a good train network, I think the unintended consequence will be more people in cars and more accidents.

Cars aren't more efficient per passenger mile/km and I don't think cars will replace airplanes. I just think that long distance travel in general will end up to have been a temporary aberration, unless you have a lot of time and money.

a bit context:

* Germany has a share of renewable energy for electricity in 2022 of 46%

* The US has a share of renewable energy for electricity in 2022 of around 22%, even tough the potential is much larger in the US than in Germany

* Germany has per capita roughly half (55%) of the US electricity consumption

* the US has roughly a 4 times larger population

* in the US there is one of the two big parties which is promoting fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas).

So then why isn't Greenpeace more active in the US than in Germany?

None of this alters the fact that they are shutting down their safe and well maintained nukes, and as a consequence will burn a lot more coal and buy a lot more gas.

And whataboutism comparisons with the US, which everyone knows is a basket case of corrupt special interests, is truly pointless.

> None of this alters the fact that they are shutting down their safe and well maintained nukes, and as a consequence will burn a lot more coal and buy a lot more gas.

That's not a fact, it's simply false.

Renewable energy will be expanded, as it has in the past. We have currently around 50% renewable energy for electricity.

> which everyone knows is a basket case of corrupt special interests

that's very shallow, given the complexity of energy policy

A huge benefit of nuclear is the ability to generate a lot of base power to smooth out various external shocks.

In addition to the fact that Germany is running on coal, as others noted, German industry has been badly decimated by the energy price hikes since the war in Ukraine started.

And Germany without industry may not be particularly viable economically, which is not only a local problem, but hits the whole EU.

Some companies are struggling to compete with higher energy costs [1]. Not a good sign.

[1] - https://www.icis.com/explore/resources/news/2023/02/24/10858...

Base power like nuclear must generate nearly constantly (or else the economics becomes much worse), so it can't smooth out shocks. There's no excess capacity that can be added when needed.

By "external shocks" I did not mean daily or weekly fluctuations, but price jumps lasting many months to several years. Like oil price spikes 2006-2008, or less extreme but longer 2010-2014. Or shorter, but more extreme natgas spikes of 2022.

Without local hydrocarbons or nuclear oil or gas price spikes drive industry out of the country. This is what happened in Germany, which apparently is doubling down on this strategy. With base nuclear power the state has a lot of flexibility to support industry in case geopolitics or neighbors' bad macro policies jack oil and gas prices up.

Nuclear is useless for dealing with shocks that are shorter than the time needed to build a nucleat plant.

Greenpeace Finland has been remarkably silent on this issue since 2014.

Google-translated webpage says now: "We follow the nuclear power debate and highlight problems related to nuclear power".

This is not the official Greenpeace Anti-Nukular message at all. :-)

As an South American living in Germany for a while I learned in a hard way that this is a society that you need to extremely cynical and act defensively about those issues to have some peace of mind.

Due to the surge in the gas and electricity after some basic math, we decided to stay 2 months away during the Winter with our family in Finland. Basically we saved €400 plus we enjoyed a quite nice time together.

My next move will definitely look for a house with a fireplace.

Fireplaces will probably be banned too. They polute, you need to be cold in the winter and pay tribute to the environmentalist gods.

Don't forget having fewer children

Fireplaces as a heat source is even more polluting than coal based energy as the exhausts are not cleaned.

It is interesting to see how political activism as actively ruining the society by pushing people to worse technologies.

Still using my “third-world-chipset” I hardly believe that (the possibility of ban fireplaces) it will have an expanded blast radius beyond Germany.

Good luck for the politician that try to do it in the Nordic countries.

Yeah, just keep burning brown coal. I drove past one of the mines, truly big pits in the middle of nowhere. They can buy power of their neighbors, like the Netherlands, we are investing in new plants.

Germany is a net exporter of electrical energy.

I think they meant instead of burning coal that they could import electricty because NL 'is building new nuclear plants'. Whether they will ever really be built is still up for grabs, as is the question whether they will make money (unlikely).

NL is not building new nuclear plants. There's talk about it, but talk is talk, not building.

It's gone a lot further than 'just talk':

https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/actueel/nieuws/2022/12/09/borss...

But there is a lot of pushback and even if they break ground there is some chance that the projects will be cancelled due to cost.

> we are investing in new plants.

Which will come way too late to make a difference and will no doubt be subsidized heavily.

It's just the neoliberals' dream to find a quick fix so they can continue as they were.

That's my reading as well: one more round of pork before the lid slams shut on the barrel because they're voted out. Our political system is in turmoil right now, there are a lot of pretty weird things going on and I'm not sure how the next elections will play out but it certainly isn't going to be boring.

Roughly, Germany has two options at the moment. Those options are doubling down on nuclear power and stabilize their economy, or relying on other forms of energy as some kind of existential gamble. No matter what they choose, it will have a domino effect on EU countries.

The nuclear option there is nonexistent because of how long it takes to build nuclear power plants. The only real option is continued expansion of renewable sources. That's also the cheapest option.

Mind boggling level of stupidity. With their campaign against nuclear, Greenpeace is an organization that dealt an enormous amount of damage to the environment and European energy independence.

I lived in Germany 30 years and have followed the country ever since. I don't think Greenpeace is particular popular in Germany. They have few activists and few supporters. The Greens' party which is clearly anti-nuclear is much more popular and still it's by by far not the biggest one in the country. A founder of the Greens' party said it this weekend: Even the Greens' party did not kill nuclear power. It was chancellor Merkel, a conservative, having the right feeling for the sentiments of the majority.

That is true in some way but the original decision to shut them down was taken about 20 years ago by the left red/green government.

Merkels convernment initially decided to keep them running longer but took a 180 after Fukushima, probably as you say having the right feeling for the majority opinion in the country at that time.

Right, there was the exit by red/green.

Later there came the exit out of the exit probably by conservatives (I don't remember).

After Fukushima came the exit out of the exit out of the exit by Merkel, conservative. That was slightly delayed by Covid or Russia's attack war (don't remember, probably the latter) but finalized last night.

Showing that lies repeated often enough can be extremely destructive.

Nuclear energy is incredibly safe. It's very compact, very reliable, emits no CO2, and extremely scalable. It's now proven that dissolved uranium in seawater can be practically extracted and continuously replenished in the ocean from dissolved rock, making it sustainable and renewable.

Greenpeace doesn't give a damn about any of that. The greens hate nuclear because it's an extremely effective way to sustain and enhance human life.

The problem with nuclear isn't safety, it's cost. If nuclear were 10x safer and no cheaper, it would go nowhere. If it were 10x cheaper and no safer, it would be going like gangbusters.

That's why you see these ridiculously pre-negotiated prices for nuclear plants that would sink any commercial project before it was even committed to the drawing board. There is no way that these things will ever be commercially viable.

Indeed. There's a reason there's never been a merchant nuclear plant, selling into a competitive electricity market, anywhere in the world.

They were in many places mostly a fig leaf in order to be able to create weapons grade nuclear material and it is no coincidence that almost every country that has heavily bet on nuclear power also has a nuclear arms arsenal.

Or a large stockpile of reactor grade plutonium (which, despite claims, can be use to make weapons), that would enable a rapid breakout of control regimes. Japan is the particular example.

Yes, that is a problem, but it's absolutely not some problem intrinsic to it - it's completely a political problem. The cost of the regulatory red tape is staggering, and beyond cost is sheer capriciousness on the part of the NRC.

Note this article for example: (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/first-new-nuclear...)

"Nuclear Reactor Approved in U.S. for First Time Since 1978"

The NRC was created in 1975. So think about that.

In stark contrast, France built 52 reactors between 1975 and 1990, supplying a whopping ~70% of France's power needs. Are the laws of physics and economics different in France? Hardly. The difference is political.

Regulatory red tape is the go-to excuse nuclear stans use for why their energy waifu is in such desperate shape.

That particular link you presented is misrepresented. New nuclear wasn't approved for decades because nuclear's economic case was shown to be nonexistent after the first nuclear buildout. The thing that killed nuclear in the US wasn't the NRC, it was the slowdown in electricity demand growth, and especially the passage of PURPA in 1978. Nuclear now had to compete with non-utility power sources, and it had no hope of doing that. The market for new NPPs dried up; without that market, there was no pressure to get new reactor designs (which also couldn't compete) through the NRC.

Climate change costs more and nuclear will easily offset that.

Nuclear appears to be economically uncompetitive with renewables + storage. This is why it's really hard to get nuclear plants funded these days, while it's much easier to get renewables and storage funded. The market is telling you something; listen.

Few markets today are free markets. Politics drives the growth of very costly "renewables" which are unreliable and intermittent - not a free market. Politics has made nuclear absurdly more costly for no good reason, just environmentalist antipathy towards nuclear. Fortunately, there is evidence that that is changing, given the abject failure of renewables to actually support the requirements of a stable civilization, proven at extremely high cost.

But the thing is that renewables + storage is more expensive than nuclear power, so there goes your argument about cost.

This is not the case in general, especially with the price renewables will achieve by the time any nuclear plant whose construction was started today could come on line.

A quick search paints a different picture

> Germany produced 674.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) in 2021 - an increase of roughly 5.5 percent compared with the previous year.

The previous year, 2020, is a bit of an outlier, though, due to covid.

The heat from hand-rubbing in Moscow exceeded total German power output today.

Maybe only looking at the increase of energy production from coal is a bit short-sighted, though. Running a large number of nuclear plants could undermine the impetus to sufficiently and timely invest into expanding renewable energy production and the related infrastructure.

Of course, it is quite some gamble, but if Germany gets it done as planned they will have a competitive advantage in a couple of decades, while other countries are struggling with aging nuclear plants and cost explosions for new ones. France is already an example for both issues.

Any energy expert(s) here? Can the world just run on renewables like Greenpeace is claiming? What are the significant obstacles to be overcome?

Significant obstacles like:

- Batteries don't work at the scale of a grid. There are a few 'natural' batteries, like the water level of a hydro dam, but none for renewables.

- Sometimes it's cloudy

- Sometimes there's no wind

- The renewable grid isn't, you know, BUILT yet.

So, despite handwaving these issues away, the "baseload" capacity remains a problem which has to be addressed by something with storable energy - eg. nuclear, hydro or coal.

Do you believe we have the technology needed to safely dispose nuclear waste without affecting the environment and future generations?

Do you believe the possible threat of nuclear waste to future generations, considering our current waste management technologies, to be higher than the impact due to more CO2 generation by running electrical coal plants instead of nuclear ones? That seems a more relevant question to me.

There's no silver bullet, and pointing problems on one side only may help win arguments (maybe?) but is not so helpful when trying to find the "best" option. Which, in real life, usually means the less bad option. Warts everywhere...

Indeed, you are correct! Is there an 'impartial' governing body that has examined these two alternatives and determined the advantages and disadvantages of each? Or is there any relevant literature that focuses on simulating/evaluating these options?

Yes.

Easily, yes. It's easy and safe to dispose of, and doesn't take much space at all.

Disposing nuclear waste effectively means putting it under ~3m of water in a place where people won't mess with it.

As of 2016, France has produced 14,000 tons of nuclear waste *in its entire history*. That's about 7 normal olympic swimming pools in total volume.

We have much bigger issues with other forms of waste, nuclear waste has always just been a scaremongering tactic for the anti-nuclear crowd.

Nuclear waste is also the issue the nuclear stans like to bring up, to propagate the falsehood that it is the issue that's holding back nuclear (so they can then correctly argue that it's not that big a problem, so incorrectly claim building more nuclear is a good idea.)

Batteries work fine at scale. What they don't do is get you to 100% renewables. But hydrogen can be used for that last 5-10%, and Europe has many petawatt hours of hydrogen storage potential available in salt formations.

Sources on "they work fine at scale"?

Last I checked 4 years ago they didn't at all in terms of costs or pollution to produce/dispose of.

Natural stores energy like nuclear or hydro remain best.

Now you're moving the goal posts. If something is too expensive, it's too expensive at small scale as well as large scale.

There is no engineering reason why a grid cannot have very large amounts of batteries attached to it. If they're at the moment too expensive, that's no inherent obstacle, since battery prices have been falling rapidly, much faster than nuclear's price ever did.

> Sources on "they work fine at scale"?

Hitchen's Razor. I can dismiss your original claim without evidence, since it was presented without evidence. In other words: sources? You go first.

I suspect you are parroting studies that assume batteries are used to get to 100% renewables, then clutch their pearls at how many batteries are needed. Using batteries for that last 10% or so is just bad engineering, so those studies are strawmen.

If you have many petawatt-hours of hydrogen storage, you don't need batteries at all.

Batteries are likely going to be better for short term storage, due to their higher round trip efficiency. Hydrogen would win for long term storage (seasonal, for example) and backing up the system against rare prolonged dark-calm periods. A combination of the two storage modes could be better than either one alone. Adding additional capabilities (transmission, intermediate term storage, dispatchable demand of various kinds) can only make things cheaper.

Ignoring the high cost of batteries and the environmental harm in building them. You can eliminate pretty much an entire class of storage needs and all the cost that portains. Heck, even pumped hydro doesn't really need to exist if you have this one, practically unlimited storage system.

> Batteries don't work at the scale of a grid

https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/Agency/Publication...

They do. This is from 2019, there are probably better and more recent sources.

> Sometimes it's cloudy > Sometimes there's no wind

Yes, so you always use a mix. The biggest problem is when there is no sun and no wind and this happens for an extended period. At those times power will likely become a lot more expensive. And as long as we don't have seasonal storage there will always be periods in the year like that, no matter where you live unless it is close to the equator.

> The renewable grid isn't, you know, BUILT yet.

You don't need a 'renewable grid', the one we have will serve just fine.

Gamechanger: HVDC to offset day/night and seasonal cycles because it allows the transport of electricity over far larger distances. This + a relatively modest amount of storage may well be the ticket.

Batteries are expensive + needs to be replaced periodically, which is making whole setup even more expensive in the long run. Batteries are dead end for energy storage.

Batteries are emphatically not a dead end, there are many more chemistries than Lithium Ion and the life spans are approaching 6000 cycles for the best kinds which is a 20 year lifespan. Yes, they are expensive, so is everything else connected to the power grid. The cost of storing a KWh and retrieving it has been steadily dropping over the past two decades making this now a feasible method to store energy at grid scale. Even so, like everything else, it is an optimization problem, you don't want to overdesign your battery storage because the safe assumption seems to be that future tech will be even better so pacing the roll-out of such tech is a prudent approach.

The main obstacle to overcome is to decrease the consumption of energy :) it's tough because people don't really care about the environment as soon as they have to even slightly change any of their habits, and the situation would require that people significantly change their habits (so I'd say we are probably screwed)

As you’ve identified, few people will opt into a lower quality of living in the name of the greater good. The solution is to find better power generation methods, rather than force people to accept a downgrade.

Well, it's not that much about acceptance, the downgrade is being forced on people right now (via drought, ocean rise, heat, fire, and other climatic events, and all this will also cause hunger, population move and wars), and it's a much worse downgrade than what people could do volontarily to mitigate the issue.

To what degree is personal consumption driving the demand for energy?

And to what degree are industrials, workplaces or collective activities we do as part of the society?

In any case, what are the ways to reduce consumption of energy at an individual level and society as a whole?

Are there any novel ideas that are yet to be explored?

For personal consumption, I'd assume a large part of the energy used directly come from home heating/cooling and transportation (cars). Solutions exist to improve both in many cases (insulation and public transportation/biking/walking).

>> Can the world just run on renewables like Greenpeace is claiming?

> The main obstacle to overcome is to decrease the consumption of energy

If we can’t produce enough power using renewables to meet current demand you cannot run the world on renewables. So “no”.

We obviously could supply much more than current demand with renewables. After all, the world is constantly being hit by 100,000 TW of sunlight, and total world primary energy demand is 18 TW.

If you are saying the currently installed renewables cannot meet current demand, why do you think additional capacity cannot be installed?

The commenter suggested that the problem with renewables is convincing people to consume less. That is not a direct replacement.

Can capacity be installed? Sure. Do we have the resources to use renewable energy immediately available to meet our current demand? No, it has to be mined, manufactured, and installed. Can we do that in a way that is economically feasible is the real question.

Of course if you look at what's immediately available, it doesn't do. How could it possibly? No one has wind and solar fields sitting around idle, just waiting to be turned on. New capacity would have to be built. That takes time (but much less time than nuclear). It takes resources, but the resources required are small compared to what industrial society as a whole consumes. And if you look at raw mass of material extracted from the ground, fossil fuels are the vast majority of mass extracted (ignoring ground water). In comparison, the metals and other materials needed for renewable sources are much less (orders of magnitude less) for a given amount of energy production.

Yeah I'm not sure why it was concluded from my comment that I was suggesting to keep the current renewable energy production at current capacity. We need to lower consumption and build more clean (or cleaner, nothing is really clean except what's not produced) energy production.

It may be a good idea to lower current consumption, but it's by no means necessary. The available renewable resource is very large. Total world rate of primary energy consumption is around 18 TW (which might correspond to 10 TW of work); the world is constantly being hit by 100,000 TW of sunlight.

You are probably right in theory, but I think all serious plans I have seen to switch to full renewable energy involved some reduction of the consumption. It's not that it's strictly necessary, but it's probably more practical in the short term at least.

I think all plans globally involve serious increases in consumption. Otherwise, one is assuming most of the world's population stays in a state of energy poverty.

I didn’t conclude that you were suggesting that we could—-quite the opposite, I posted both the original comment and yours to make the distinction. Your comment was responding to the notion that the world can run on renewables. You didn’t make the claim that it could, you made the claim that we would need to decrease consumption so it could.

So the answer is “no” at current consumption and current renewable capacity. Further consumption will only increase, so to get to a 100% renewable place, we need to account for capacity increase and build that into the equation. We cannot make moving to renewables dependent of something that will not happen.

> So the answer is “no” at current consumption and current renewable capacity

What is this "current renewable capacity" nonsense? Currently installed capacity? Current rate of construction of renewable capacity? None of those are physical constants of nature. We want more renewables, we build more. We want them faster, we build more factories.

You seem to be trying to imply there's some sort of limit that prevents renewables from being installed to replace fossil fuels. There really isn't any such limit.

You need investment to do it and to get that investment, you need a payback that encourages the investment. Without that there is a limit.

I am talking a real ROI—not based on some apocalyptic prediction of “if we don’t invest a $1 now it’s going to cost us $100 90 years from now…”. That sort of scaremongering is not going to encourage investment because the return needs to be on a smaller time scale. We need industry to see that when they put up $1000 in renewables, it’s going to result in a $5000 return vs we put $1000 in fossil fuel tech that results in $3000 in the same time frame.

What, you're objecting because an energy system to power an industrial economy is expensive? Of course it's expensive, regardless of whether it's extracting fossil fuels, fissioning atoms, or capturing sunlight or wind.

We spend something like 5% of our GDP on energy. There is a very large budget available for replacing current energy sources with new ones.

What renewables have in their favor over fossil fuels is the lack of externalized costs foisted on everyone else. Toss in those costs -- as one should do, if one is honestly looking at the cost of an energy source -- and renewables save money, and a lot of it.

You are reading much more into my comment than is what is actually there. You need industry to make renewables happen, but industry will focus where the greatest return is first. A global scale move to renewables will only happen when their are not other options with more return.

Energy orgs and their investors are looking at the shorter game…the <10 year ROI, they do not care as much about the longer game with the >50 year ROI. Frankly I bet you will not find an energy organization CEO in 2023 who truly gives a shit if their company even exists in 2073 let alone showing a profit.

So what do you do? Find that entrepreneur willing to play the long game. One name comes to mind, but now he is pretty much universally hated on HN, so god forbid we bring his name up. But…you need a nut job type like an Elon to push the envelope and be willing to bleed some money for a long time to move the needle just enough to show that there just might be a market worth exploring by others.

You touched on the resource availability but not the economic viability. Mining, manufacturing, and land—all expensive. Renewables are a great goal, but without realistic economics you will simply will not get the level of investment to get there a fast as the proponents would like.

To give a personal example—I live in a very efficient home in Florida. My electricity runs me average about $115/mo, despite running A/C almost all year round. The cheapest I can put solar on my roof to have net $0 electrical consumption costs is around $135-150/mo (with a 15 year pay off, which will be long past when I sell this home). Additionally, because of our wetter summers and some problematic installers some of my neighbors have had roof leak issues. Thanks to incorrect installations homeowners are dealing with voided roof warranty issue revealing a hidden cost of owning solar. These issues make solar an occasional barrier in real estate sales. Considering all of the I don’t see a realistic economic reason to put solar on my roof.

Land is not expensive in most parts of the world. In west Texas, for example, land contributes maybe 1-2% of the cost of a PV field.

Other resources (steel, glass, aluminum, for example) needed to build a renewable energy system capable of powering the world will be small compared to the resources otherwise used by that world industrial economy. Renewables don't require any resource that isn't required in general (some renewable sources or storage technologies do, but this is not generally true.) Those other resources would be consumed even if the world were powered by something else. So, if resource constraints prevent renewables from working, they prevent industrial society from working at all.

Home PV in the US is several times more expensive than utility scale PV, because installing PV at small scale on awkward elevated surfaces like residential roofs is a more complex problem than just laying them out on the ground (not even mounting hardware is needed now; just lay them flat. https://www.erthos.com/ )

I'm pro renewables, but I think the supply side is a significant obstacle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc

I'm not going to waste time watching a video; they're very poor at efficiently transmitting information compared to text. Can you summarize the argument so I can poke holes in it?

Germany is running on coal. It's by far the worst example of energy vs pollution in Europe.

I think Poland might be worse actually, but yes Germany is bad.

But this coal is endorsed by Greenpeace so it's basically renewable energy.

It's renewable if Greenpeace can somehow release the CO2 from our childrens lungs.

1. Poe's law

2. Removing CO2 is basically 50% of the lungs job and they do it just fine.

That a dumb and incorrect statement.

Here is the first link when you google "greenpeace coal germany".

The level of stupidity from this and many other comments makes me wonder how many russian plants are here trying to push some agenda.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/press-release/20429...

Russian plants are feeling accomplished ever since Germany started building gas power plants like crazy. Phasing out coal is great, phasing out nuclear before coal is as idiotic as you can get.

I'm convinced that European Greens are 50% Russian assets 50% useful idiots.

Coal used to be a biomass, therefore coal is renewable by definition.

it's 33% coal and 34% wind + solar in 2022 (https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2023/03...).

Greenpeace want a collection of energy policies to be implemented: demand reduction, renewable power generation, no nuclear power, no fossil fuel power.

[1] is their policy from 2010. It suggests more CHP, renewable electricity generation with demand peaks balanced with hydrogen storage, improved electric public transport, rail rather than road freight, etc.

I don't have time to read it now, it is 260 pages with lots of figures.

[1] https://wayback.archive-it.org/9650/20200402044541/http://p3...

Yes, the world can run on renewables. This has become completely clear. And it's likely to end up cheaper than using nuclear, especially when you consider that today's thermal reactors cannot power the world for more than a few years before the cheap uranium runs out.

Europe's problem is that they're not well sited to use solar, compared to places closer to the equator. So heavy industry may move elsewhere. Nuclear will not change this, since solar in those best locations is very cheap.

This is beyond stupid, this is malicious

Life comes to you so fast Germany…

45% price increase in a region starting at 1 Jun 23.

[1] - https://rp-online.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/energiepreise-nr...

You can almost hear the champagne being opened in the FSB headquarters in Moscow.

I doubt it. The share of nuclear power was too small to matter geopolitically, just 5% of electricity.

These were just the last 5%, go back around 20 years where the shutdown was initially decided and it was about 30%.

I know. But the idea that they'd pop the Champagne now suggests that the closure of the remaining plants was a reason for Russia to celebrate. However, if the phasing out of nuclear in Germany was ever a reason for them to celebrate, they would have celebrated long ago. Also, Russia is a major source of Uranium, so it's not at all clear that this is actually good for them. Further, even 20 years ago, nuclear covered only a tiny part of Germany's primary energy needs (at no time more than 12%) and could have easily been compensated for with coal. So again, it's not clear at all that ending nuclear has pushed the geopolitical needle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com