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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Result in massive exports to countries like Germany that aren't responsible with their electricity production?
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?
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.
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.
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.