Bavaria mulls reopening nuclear plant under state control
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Söder is in the middle of his re-election campaign. This is just another round of his useless populism.
(I live in Munich and have been observing this whole process of shutting down nuclear since it started 23 years ago)
If you want to learn more about the history and implementation of the shutdown decision and process: https://www.base.bund.de/EN/ns/nuclear-phase-out/nuclear-pha... is a good starting point. It’s from the German Federal Office for the safety of nuclear waste.
This is just hot air.
P.S.: thanks for the COVID updates
In fact check out what he said in 2011:
> In Bavaria, the CSU and FDP cannot agree on a date for the nuclear phase-out. Environment Minister Söder insists on 2022 as the exit year – apparently at any price. The Bavarian Environment Minister Markus Söder (CSU) apparently links the schedule for the nuclear phase-out in Bavaria to his office. At the Council of Ministers meeting on Tuesday, Söder threatened to resign if the Free State decided to phase out nuclear energy at a later date than 2022, reports the "Süddeutsche Zeitung", citing cabinet members.
https://www-welt-de.translate.goog/politik/deutschland/artic...
That's why he was for closing the power plant in the first place. In 2011 was the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
It's a quite popular strategy on the right side of the political spectrum in the West.
This is by design in a democracy. However due to political parties, the pol may simply attach to the most powerful sub group they can use to parley themselves into re-election. So they often double down on their existing stances to keep/grow their core voting bloc.
I'm not sure I agree. It's one thing to claim that opinions changed, but an entirely different thing to feign support for topics you have no intention or expectation to act upon just because it might help you poll better. This last one is diametrically opposed to "the will of the people".
> This transition, which we will achieve by then, will not only change the country in the long term, but also set impulses for the whole world.
Now he's using the opportunity to shift the blame on parties that had nothing to do with his decision.
[1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2011-05/seehofer-soe...
[2] https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2011-05/csu-seehofer-vor...
So why turn off the working ones if you're anti-nuke? Why not just stop new construction? They're going to burn coal instead, which releases vastly more radioactive material.
Unfortunately this is not the case, decommissioning for example is extremely expensive though can be deferred for years. Nuclear requires a large and expensive workforce, expensive maintenance, extremely expensive fuel possessing before it’s us fuel in a nuclear reactor, and insurance that’s so expensive no private company is able to offer it.
Construction being the largest cost is really in reference to financing + construction + land + regulatory hurdles + any R&D costs. The direct construction costs run about twice what staffing does over the plant’s lifespan. However, because profits are so low and construction takes so long the loans must extend over decades which greatly inflates the cost of construction. On the flip side delaying decommissioning means the money set aside can grow before you’re forced to spend it.
As strange as it sounds lowering operating costs would actually reduce “construction” costs as you could pay back the loans sooner.
Well then closing plants makes even less sence, youll have to decomission them sooner
As I understand it, nuclear power plants are limited by corrosion so the end date for decommissioning is likely based on the power plants construction date not its final date of operation. There’s regulations that lost decommissioning must finish within 60 years of shutdown, but that stuff is often flexible in practice where physics isn’t.
The fact is that Germany will build 13 GW of renewables this year, which offsets those last 4 GW of Nuclear somewhat.
As to what happened in France, it is not related to the nuclear technology itself and could have happen to any type of technology. They built all those power plants following the same design at the same time and all failed the same way at the same time. No surprise here.
* Or maybe a country with a very small population and a lot of unused land maybe which is a pretty small category.
What utter bullshit. Most countries could do so.
Granted, Germany will be at a competitive disadvantage vs. countries at lower latitude that won't need as much storage. But that's a separate issue. It could mean they won't need as much energy for industry, since their industry will move elsewhere.
But if you actually do the arithmetic, you will find that land constraints are not important for most countries. There's plenty of land for most countries to produce what they need (as long as they don't do something braindead like trying to burn biomass). Put it another way: the value of the energy generated per area of land is much greater than the value produced by other uses of the land, like agriculture or forestry, and no one claims those are infeasible.
I believe this wrong belief about renewables not being able to do the job came from the assumption that large amounts of biofuel would be needed (IIRC MacKay's "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" made this mistake). The efficiency of sunlight => fuel from growth of biomass is very low.
If you optimize the system with the right combination of solar/wind (which are typically somewhat anticorrelated, or at least somewhat independent), and various kinds of storage, you can generate an artificial steady output for not that much. See https://model.energy/ for a web site that generates cost optimal (under various cost assumptions and using historical weather data) solutions to this problem in various places.
Remember, we're talking about a claim that renewables are fundamentally blocked from providing the power for the grid in most countries. If you exclude the possibility of additional foreseeable technological development, then nuclear also fails, since existing commercial reactors very quickly exhaust the available economical uranium if they are asked to power the world.
Unfortunately when wishes and hard reality meets for a fight, the reality wins.
In this case failure modes of renewable-only policy are not obvious, but this doesn't mean they don't exist. Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking.
The current renewable build out across Europe so far tackled the easiest problem - replacement of other sources of electricity during times when the Sun is shining and the wind is blowing. Going the other ~70% of time will be much harder.
Another fact is that Germany was producing over 36% of its energy using coal plants in Q3 last year. (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/12/PE22_518_433.html#:...)
That is 207 GW. Which gives some perspective about how far away GE is from completely relying on renewable energy, this 13 GW next year is very little.
4 GW from nuclear energy is also not much, but it still is a lot cleaner than burning coal.
When we got 207 GW of coal why are we talking about those 4 GW of Nuclear at all?
We're good: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR
The issues we had this winter would not have occurred if the nuclear park hadn't been ignored by our politicians for 20 years.
You can however look at Germany for the impact of a day with no sun and no wind.
Result in massive exports to countries like Germany that aren't responsible with their electricity production?
By keeping the existing Natural gas plants available the world will have sufficient peak and compensation capacity until improvements to the grid and batteries make 100% renewables viable.
These are small compared with the initial outlay, and with fossil fuel plants (where the fuel costs dominate) but not small compared with building new renewables from scratch.
The Lazard PDF currently linked from this site has numbers on this.
Engineering wise, there are a lot of parts of the reactor that I think you have to pick between being able to service and replace the part and having it be useful and safe. So when those parts wear out, you can't really fix them. Or you have to wait so long for it to be safe to service them, that it's not worth it.
Coal and gas plants don't last forever either, but they can generally be rebuilt in place, making the comparison tricky. Coal tends to release all of its radioactive waste into the air, the facility itself doesn't become a hazard to service.
Not really. The hard part is ensuring that nuclear can be safe throughout it's service life. This is what leads to construction process to be extremely expensive, and certification is just an umbrella term that means "checking if the plant doesn't exhibit any of the risks involving pre established problems and disaster scenarios by going through a number of checks."
That and the fact that almost all nuclear plants tend to be one-off projects nowadays unlike in the 60s and 70s (and of the plants built in the west back then are still at least 100 times "safer" than the coals plants that are currently operated when measured in the number of deaths caused, of course premature deaths due to unnecessary pollution seem to be very cheap politically..).
After 16 years of Merkel breaking renewables, they're being expanded again. An expansion which, in the past helped to establish this technology on this planet.
Edit (since the Astro-Turf downvotes prevent me from answering to even more falsehoods being posted here...): And no, they couldn't have phased out coal completely because NO party wanted to lose voters in those regions where coal is generated. Just have a look at the name and tasks of the commission tasked with the phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
See my edit.
Like a nuclear accident in one of the rotting French reactors for example.
Meanwhile, the expansion of cheap renewable energy which gets better and cheaper continues to happen.
Yes, Fukushima was nowhere near as catastrophic as Chernobyl, but it was very effective in creating the impression that this kind of thing will keep happening; that power plants aren’t safe even in an impeccably diligent culture like Japan (as it’s perceived in the West); that the tireless anti-nuclear campaigning of the preceding decades had been right all along. That’s the kind of public mood that politicians can ill afford to ignore.
But is safety really the primary concern amongst the public? I mean there are perfectly valid economic arguments against developing nuclear power, especially nowadays. Of course stopping the expansion of nuclear power back in the 70/80s was a huge tragedy. If we stayed on the same trajectory as throughout the 60s well.. climate change would probably be viewed as a more or less solved (or at least an actually solvable) issue today.
And honestly, if nuclear energy was financially viable would it be hard to change this quite irrational 'mood'? I mean in the EU alone pollution form Coal plants causes about twice as much premature deaths as the Chernobyl disaster did over a 20 year period (according to the worst estimates, it would be about 8 times as much if we use the IAEA figures).
Nuclear is objectively one of the safest sources of energy. If we exclude Chernobyl (we should since it was a direct outcome of a multistage failure which is only possible in idiocratic states like the USSR) it's about a hundredfold safer than natural gas which is about 10 less harmful (when measuring in human lives) than coal for an equivalent amount of power generated.
> The “safe and reliable” part was wrecked in the general public’s perception
Unless we believe that the general public is completely mathematically illiterate (i.e. most people couldn't pass a basic 2nd grade level math test) this shouldn't be too hard to change with enough political will.
Of course climate change and pollution weren't huge concerns back in the 80s especially. Especially for the so-called "green" parties in Germany and other countries...
Actually the opposite at least where coal is concerned per kWh it emits "only" 2x more CO2 but (according to estimates) causes 10x more deaths than natural gas.
20-30 thousand people die every year due to pollution from coal power plants in the EU alone. That's basically 2 to 8 "free" Chernobyls every single year...
And rational, for Germany which does:
- not have nuclear weapons
- has far cheaper renewables in cost per kwh
- is densely populated with no viable far away place to store the stuff
means to quit nuclear.
In the end the debate depends on whether externalities are internalized or not. If they are internalized, renewable energy wins hands down [2].
—-
[0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium
[1] Germany got sued previously for undoing an exit. It‘s predictable this would happen again.
[2] As shown in the report by the scientific service of the German parliament: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edc...
Currently yes.
In the 80s and 90s not so much. It's huge a tragedy nuclear expansion stopped back then because nuclear was very cheap if we factor the indirect costs from burning fossil fuels (specifically premature deaths and other healthcare issues due to pollution. We basically get 2 to 8 free Chernobyls every year just by burning coal in the EU alone. Stopping climate change would just have been a free bonus).
The fact that some people (especially non-Germans) repeat this blame-show shows where it actually comes from: an misguided Astro-Turf campaign which doesn't care about facts.
I think it's fair to expect a party with this name to do better for climate change.
Meanwhile, without them, we wouldn't have almost half of our electricity generated by actually clean energy sources (renewables). They did a lot for climate change, and ignoring those facts in favor of false statements won't make it go away. It just makes those who spread those lies look stupid in the eyes of those who actually know the facts.
The German taxpayer did a lot to push renewable energy for the whole world, and the movement was very much motivated by the Greens. You should thank them and not spit on them.
So what is this? Why are you keep doing this?
This thread is a circle jerk fueled by false information created by a right wing influenced Astro-Turf. You swim with them, and you keep on putting more nonsense on top of it. Now their current energy policy is a disaster?? What? I bet you don't even know what their current energy policy actually is. You just whine because nuclear is gone. The result of decisions made and not made by all other relevant parties in Germany.
Thus, countries should plan for an increase of electricity usage to be ready.
Bavaria is also vehemently blocking any attempt to put storage for nuclear fuel in their area.
I'm sorry, did the laws of physics changed in the last couple of decades?
Maybe do a bare minimum of research before posting a snide comment?
Yes, this means the half lives are still the same, and the original claim was patently nonsense.
> however the ability to reduce waste half lives by reusing spent fuel rods has changed,
This is also patently false. The advances in nuclear reprocessing only mean that spent fuel rods can be refined and reused, so that the resulting nuclear waste has fewer material with eternal half lives.
Still the shortest half lives of the remaining materials still span thousands of years, which in humanity's time scale means they are eternal.
> so we don’t need to store waste for ten thousand years.
The thing is, you still do. The shortest half lives are tens of thousands of years. Those are the shortest ones. material with longer half lives still exist in spent nuclear fuel, but with lower concentrations. What leads you to believe they don't exist?
Grammar error aside - ‘eternal’ half lives don’t exist. The time taken for radioactivity to decay by half cannot be and is not 'forever'. That's very basic maths. Again you’re aggressively incorrect.
What exactly leads you to believe that shutting off nuclear power is anything other than a good idea?
> Personally I'd like to see nuclear power be a part of a stable baseline for a few more decades.
It was my understanding that by now it was clear this is all around an awful idea. What leads you to still think otherwise?
Also it's not a given that the renewable strategy will succeed. The bulk electricity prices are already going down to zero across Germany at random times when the weather is good. Which means the renewable energy business don't get revenue when they generate the most electricity. As a consequence even more subsidies are required to further increase the share of renewables.
This is patently false.
Isar plants were built in the 70s. Back then Germany's share of renewable energy sources was residual. Since then, Germany started shutting off nuclear and currently over 40% of it's energy needs are met with renewable energy sources.
The only way to claim that Germany is replacing nuclear with coal and gas is if you opt to go the disingenuous route and claim that some coal and gas power plants went online while nuclear plants were being shut down.
> Also it's not a given that the renewable strategy will succeed.
What? Supplying nearly half of a country's energy needs is now a sign of failure?
It's not false, it's just probably not easy to understand.
It's easy to understand if we consider a hypothetical situation where the nuclear power plant is running AND Germany still keeps all other renewable plans. Since the demand does not change, what other generation would not be running in this case? It is coal and gas.
Thus, by shutting down nuclear, several coal or gas power plants are running instead of idling somewhere.
> What? Supplying nearly half of a country's energy needs is now a sign of failure?
Success in this case is replacement of dirty electricity generation and not using the rest of Europe as a giant battery to solve the unpredictability of renewable generation. The limits of easy renewable deployments are becoming exhausted and it will become much harder to increase the share of renewables even more.
I think we agree that it's great that Germany runs so many renewables already. But long-term objective is much more and it's not clear that it will be achieved.
In other words, the thesis has no basis and you have a hard time coming across people who swallow nonsense.
> It's easy to understand if we consider a hypothetical situation where the nuclear power plant is running AND Germany still keeps all other renewable plans.
Is your personal belief held by artificial scenarios that are both absurd and unrealistic?
No wonder people find this blend of bullshit claim hard to understand.
lol
It's objectively a terrible idea until a single coal power plants is still running anywhere in Europe (well approximately anyway...).
Unless that is you consider the value of human lives to be insignificant. 20-30 thousand people die in the EU alone because of coal, slowing down climate change is just a "free" bonus..
> It was my understanding that by now it was clear this is all around an awful idea
Not building more nuclear plants before renewables became economically viable was a awful idea (of course only if you care about pollution and climate change which the German Green had did not even the tiniest bit back in the 80s)
That's not an explanation or rationale. You just repeated a personal belief.
Do you have any rational basis to support that belief? Repeating "because I said so" doesn't make nuclear power more of an option, nor does it eliminate any of it's many problems.
> Unless that is you consider the value of human lives to be insignificant. 20-30 thousand people die in the EU alone because of coal, slowing down climate change is just a "free" bonus..
It should be good news to you then that Germany is also phasing out coal power along with nuclear then, with 2028 set as the deadline.
> Not building more nuclear plants before renewables became economically viable was a awful idea (...)
Reality does not agree with you, as proven by the fact that nearly half of Germany energy needs already come from renewable sources while Nuclear is already on its way out. It makes no sense at all to try to spin this problem as some clerical issue, specially now when renewables are a tremendous success.
Are you implying that burning coal results in about as 100-1000 as many deaths as nuclear for the same amount of power generated? I assumed that was common knowledge, sorry..
> It should be good news to you then that Germany is also phasing out coal power along with nuclear then
I guess. They could have already done so by now if not a decade or two ago.
> Reality does not agree with you, as proven by the fact that nearly half of Germany energy needs already come from renewable sources while Nuclear is already on its way out
Yes and? What about share of renewables in 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005? I never said nuclear would be a good option now, it's way too late for that now. However switching to nuclear the same way France did back in the 80s would have resulted in significantly less pollution and CO2 emission (or will you try to argue with that by saying the word "reality" a lot and saying?).
Had this happened worldwide we would be already 10-20 years ahead in the fight against climate change (also prevented thousands if not millions of unnecessary deaths).
Obviously jumping straight to renewables back in the 80s and 90s would have been ideal. Nuclear was the second best option. Sticking to fossil fuels was obviously the worst (even though it was the cheapest, at least if we ignore the externalities, option back then).
No they don't. They had a problem this year (and will for probably a few years). For the past decades, France has been a net exporter [0].
> An french three-mile island can happen any time
And a climate crisis is happening now and thousand of people die of respiratory disease every year. The problem is not as simple as you make it sound.
[0] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/France/electricity_exports/
The spread was much tighter before. Because "renewables"* are unreliable and needed gas plants to make up for when the wind doesn't blow, or the sun doesn't shine, price spiked up after the Ukraine war started. They wouldn't have had this problem with nuclear.
French woes are mainly linked to an aging infrastructure and delayed maintenance due to Covid-19.
Ah, and fun fact, did you know that coal emits more radioactivity per kwh than nuclear? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-...
The German's foreign affairs office was funding the Henrich Boll fundation, which campaigns in France for renewables along with the anti-nuclear movement? https://archive.is/tSY2w#selection-1357.95-1357.108
The renewable sector is for from being "clean", there are many cases of corruption, influences, and vested interests behind the main proponents of this solution. Gazprom funded antinuclear movements in Europe. Many "fundations", acting for the fossil fuel industry, fund the movements that suit their agenda. https://twitter.com/GeWoessner/status/1498411537144463360
As we saw since the start of 2022, this bet has paid handsomely. EU citizens will have to deal with pollution, increased electricity prices, and wind turbines impossible to recycle.
One could also go on about how China killed the EU solar panels industry by handing out unlimited subsidies. The EU was so slow to act that when they started to tax chinese panels, it was too late already. The funniest thing being that those panels are made using coal power, so it's likely that solar panels from China are worse than their alternatives. Just like electric cars in Eastern Europe emit more CO2 than thermic due to the widespread use of the worst kind of coal there to produce electricity. https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
Negative externalities from burning coal are pretty significant*. Of course it depends on the value you place on a human life.
https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/news/23-00....
> An french three-mile island can happen any time
As long as the likelihood of that remains substantially low it's not a huge issue. I mean the cost would be almost entirely financial since nobody died because of it (the same obviously can't be said about burning coal or even natural gas...).
This is a ridiculous claim.
Edit: Source https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
Your comment would be fine without that second sentence.
Contrast this with what Finland is doing. Finland is going to be one of the leading European nations in 20 years.
1600 MW for 11 billion Euro is a bad deal.
"Nuclear reactor Olkiluoto 3 has gone online in Finland some 12 years behind schedule and on a massively inflated budget."
https://www.dw.com/en/finlands-much-delayed-nuclear-plant-la...
Where do you even get the Finland story from? It's not like having (finally) a new nuclear reactor running makes them some kind of unicorn. Again: please deliver facts. Sources. Anything besides those preachings from Shellenbergers Astro-Turf.
providES. It used to be around 25% back in 2000 and was still above 10% untill very recently...
> This is a ridiculous claim.
Well... I'm sorry, but you seem to be an expert on those.
PovidED. You even admit it in the following sentence...
> It used to be around 25% back in 2000
And people where spreading the same fake news and fear back than. As we see today: it was stupid.
> and was still above 10% untill very recently...
No it wasn't. It was 6% max and more like 3% before Ukraine. If you want to correct somebody's statement, bring sources. Here is one for my numbers:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
> Well... I'm sorry, but you seem to be an expert on those.
Compared to what you dropped here, I actually am one. Thank you.
If you actually looked at data from previous years on the site you posted:
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Branchen-Unternehmen/Energ...
You would see that nuclear was still 11,8% in 2021.
I mean really? You keep saying stuff like "fake news" and "ridiculous claim" when you can't even be bothered to read the sources you're "citing". Why?
Also oil price is still as low as it is because Russia is allowed to export most of it into third countries which decreases demand for non-Russian oil making it cheaper for Germany/EU.
As long as Russia has access to the global market Germany has not really replaced it even if none of or its products directly ended up in Germany. The only positive aspect is that China/India/etc. get to keep a significant proportion of cash which would go to Russia without the sanctions.
There is no way around it. German foreign policy regarding Russia over the last 2 decades was a huge failure. Of course the same applies to many other countries but Germany is one of the most egregious examples...