Report from the German Parliament's “Sustainable by Design” Conference

This was a political choice, not technical. It was entirely possible to extend their lifetimes. They just chose not to.

The Green politicians and activists are the ones who spent decades hyping up the dangers of nuclear, they influenced a whole generation. The fact that it was a different party that implemented it is immaterial; they were the authors of the whole ideology. Fanatical minority parties force the hand of cowardly or indifferent moderates all the time. It would not have happened without them.

Besides, they are actually in coalition right now, and had the opportunity at the last minute to change their minds, when Russia started the war and suddenly Germany couldn't rely on gas anymore. But they didn't. They chose coal.

It's completely preposterous to say it's not the Greens' fault.

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Can't reply to other comment because of cooldown, putting my reply here:

>No, they had not. It takes several years to refuel the reactors and check them. At this point they are empty because of the long planned shutdown. Additionally, it would cost billions in penalty, because of the poor decisions of past conservative government. And finally, the nuclear fuel for Germans reactors comes from Russia, which would defeat the whole purpose of all sanctions in the last year.

Nope, nope, nope. Greens have continually lied about this. Inspections would not have taken years:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germanys-gas-crisis-...

>Responding to the government's nuclear safety concerns, TUEV, a major provider of industrial testing and certification, said it was possible to continue operating the three remaining nuclear power plants from a safety point of view.

>The plants are in a technically excellent condition," Joachim Buehler, managing director at TUEV, told Reuters, adding that an extensive check, which is usually done every 10 years, was necessary but could be done within a few months.

Nor was there any problem of fuel availability. Westinghouse offered to make new fuel rods and could have delivered them by Q4 2022; Habeck just said no.

https://public.substack.com/p/anti-nuke-greens-menace-europe

I repeat: there was no technical, safety, or logistical reason whatsoever that the plants couldn't have been brought back up. It was purely a political choice.

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>Correct, they hyped up the dangers. Considering what happened in Chernobyl and Fukushima, I'd argue the we're and are spot on about what happens when reactors critically fail. In 2011, several of Germanys reactors were in horrendous conditions.

German reactors are inherently safer than Soviet RBMK reactors, in that they have containment vessels and are not shrouded in institutional secrecy. Literally nobody died from the Fukushima disaster. And there is no rigorously imaginable scenario where a magnitude-9 earthquake followed by a 10 metre high tsunami could happen in Germany. If the plants were in a poor condition, then bring them to a better condition. There was no reason whatsoever for the Fukushima disaster to trigger outright decommissioning of Germany's nuclear fleet. It just doesn't rationally follow. No new relevant information was learned; people already knew what a meltdown was.

>The Greens were always advocating for safe and clean alternatives. Thats solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, but instead of following that path, CDU and SPD decided to buy more gas from Russia. There were multiple periods in the last 16 years where politicians from both parties were actively sabotaging the building of new wind and solar in favour for more coal. Sigmar Gabriel, being a prime example of that.

Hydroelectric power is neither safe nor environmentally friendly. You have to dam a river, flood thousands of acres of land, and a single dam failure can kill more people than all the casualties of any other power source put together, apart from coal:

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

>1975 Banqian Dam failure: 26,000 dead from flooding, 145,000 dead from subsequent famine and epidemics, 11 million homeless.

By the Chernobyl/Fukushima doctrine, this one event should have made everyone else dismantle their hydroelectric dams, shouldn't it?

Barring new technical innovations, geothermal is marginal anywhere except Iceland. Wind and solar are safe but land-hungry.

When you say "advocated for safe and clean alternatives", that's just begging the question. Nuclear is already safe and clean, and hence needs no advocacy for an alternative on that basis.

>2 of the reactors, Neckarwestheim and Emsland, had only old fuel rods left over. Estimates suggest at best a continuation at 60% capacity for 80 days. Acquiring new ones isn't something you can just do. From order to delivery it takes 12-18 months. Since reactors were being shut down, they simply didn't have the personal to keep them running. There was also no planned upkeep since 2009, which is another major time and cost point. So at best, those reactors would have run for 80 days before having to power up coal again. Instead of spending all that money on mainting old infrastructure, we can just as well massively build and invest into green energy. That would produce more energy, for a lesser amount of money.

I've already addressed the parts about delays and fuel availability above. As for money: Germany has already spent half a trillion euros on the transition to renewables. Half a trillion! And they're still getting half their energy from carbon-emitting sources. What they're doing now is not cheap at all. They could have built several dozen brand new plants for that amount of money, and have rock-solid reliable zero-carbon electric baseload, enough to power all of central Europe.

Not true. France had their nuclear fleet in limbo, unable to know how to plan due to EU rules saying X amount of energy must be generated from a green source. Sadly EU (well Germany) blocked that for many years, causing France to be stuck in a position of unable to invest or develop its nuclear energy (which btw they used to export lots, including to Germany). https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-to-veto-eu-plan-to-l...

That got fixed in the end, as long as they agreed to label Gas as green energy generation, which Germany wanted and indeed, needed to comply with EU rules they help create.

You could say Germany handicapped France and held them to ransom, you could say that, but to say France messed up would be utterly unfair with the full context at play.

... and they would not have needed to do this in the first place if Germany's nuclear fleet hadn't already been crippled on purpose. You cannot deliberately reduce your baseload capacity, and then blame another country for an accidental reduction.

>2. They were meant to be turned off. But due to Russia's boyscout army having a field day, they were put on ready, in case the gas goes low. Which didn't happen, but ironically they had to be turned on to keep France from going dark.

They should never have been "meant to be turned off" in the first place. And by the way, the gas did go low. That was what all the energy rationing and crazy prices were about. People and businesses had to reduce their consumption of energy.

>3. It was conservatives who messed up the renewable thing and did a back and forth with nuclear; >4. It was conservatives ...

Yes and who was forcing that back-and-forth? They're trying to win anti-nuclear votes and get shit done in states with Green coalitions. You recognize that the fossil fuel lobby can sway the behaviour of politicians without literally being in power as a formal governing party, yet you don't recognize the lobbying influence of the Greens, which is much stronger in practical terms?

>7. The majority of households heat with fossil fuels (mostly gas nowadays). No amount of nuclear can change that overnight. Millions of homes need to switch their entire heating systems. This should have been done long ago, but guess who prevented it?

This is a funny thing Green apologists do: they'll say nuclear can't fix gas dependency overnight. But the gas-dependency problem is only in existence because years ago nuclear was chosen to be phased out, and the only alternative was gas. In the counterfactual world where this didn't happen, a greater share of houses would have electric heating rather than gas, like it is in France, so the problem would not exist. In other words, Green anti-nuclear policies create an artificial problem, then they'll use the fact that nuclear can't instantly fix that problem as an additional anti-nuclear argument.

Nobody else is as fanatically opposed to nuclear power as the Greens. They ran a focused, deliberate campaign of propaganda, lies, obstructionism, protest, and sabotage, over decades. Conservative fecklessness doesn't get you to this situation. UK conservatives aren't much different to yours; they take money from fossil fuel interests and have to listen to anti-wind NIMBYs. But somehow our old reactors are still running, and yours aren't, and the difference is something in the German political culture that made the Greens more effective there than here.

Imagine a counterfactual Green party, actually worthy of the name, that shed the anti-nuclear message after the Cold War ended, and embraced nuclear as a valuable tool to fight global warming. Imagine that party is as effective in that timeline as it is in ours. In that timeline, the Energiewende doesn't have a gas-dependent "transitional phase"; instead existing nuclear reactors are kept running and new ones begin construction around the end of the 2000s, coming online in the late 2010s, where they form the backbone of a decarbonized grid. Electric heating gradually displaces gas heating, Putin's regime doesn't get as much hard currency from gas exports, and nobody would have ever heard of Greta Thurnberg.

In the same way solar and wind aren't carbon free either yes