>The decision to phase out nuclear has long been made (for good reasons).
No, it was made for bad reasons.
>Keeping them active or even building new reactors of that kind is not an economically viable solution. The price Germany pays for this is higher carbon emissions for the time being until renewables push coal out of the mix. What Germany gains, on the other hand, is the removal of the most expensive form of energy
_Existing_ nuclear reactors are the cheapest possible source of electricity. You already had to build them and will have to close them. Left is the cheapest part, of actually operating them.
Using lignite only slowed the reduction of coal, nuclear was almost completely replaced by renewables.
https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c...
Not to mention all the previously closed plants.
Every MW of nuclear shut down while coal is still running is coal displacing nuclear.
You can see here [1] that on a time frame of 2000 to 2022 Germany is yet to replace reduction of nuclear generation (Kernkraft) with renewables. Construction of renewables in 2023 has only accelerated 50% relative to 2022 [2].
[1] https://www.tech-for-future.de/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/... [2] https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart....
Which is another misrepresentation of statistics given that we use less electricity today than 20 years ago.
See this page for "all varieties" of the same graphs. Generally coal is on a downward trajectory, except the blip for the Covid years.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
What entire EU gained is getting to support often unstable electricity grid in Germany. So we all gained a lot by the looks of it.
Importing will likely be "cheap", because we all agree to collectively pretend that externalities like CO2 emissions or catastrophic pollution from coal plants are not a thing.
Can't see how any of these options are good.
"In 2023, Germany lacks 15 to 20 gigawatt of secured power output”. This comment was from Harald Schwarz, Professor for energy distribution and high voltage technology at the Brandenburg University of Technology. EU Fact check rates this as mostly true.
The claim that germany has sufficient capacity for its energy needs is just wrong.
And all of this still ignores the fact, that there is a highly connected international electricity market, that large scale storage solutions are being prepared, and that the grid is becoming more decentralized.
You are right, the goal is not 100% secured energy supply but we have multiple problems at the same time - energy security and climate change to name just two.
Error over time: 0
Competitive even without a strong government regulation to enforce people paying for externalities, and even working against the entrenched intests of fossil fuels.
A solution which is rolling out at a truly astonishing rate.
What happens in Germany is irrelevant compared with what has happened globally due, in large part, to Germany.
There is absolutely no reason the (ex-west) German nuclear power plants could not have been life extended. They were extremely reliable and about 10GWe of modern PWRs were finished in the late 80s. They could have easily be extended to at least 2030 had there been the political will at not a huge amount of cost. The RoI with current/previous high energy prices would have probably been 100 fold.
I absolutely agree with you that we need the coal plants and imports for base load. For a fully renewable grid, we need massive storage capacity. This, however, is far from an unsolved problem. The problem is that the economic incentives aren't aligned with that goal yet. There is reason to be optimistic though, and that the money Germany is saving on nuclear, is more sustainably and effectively spent on renewables and storage.
I'm not sure how much existing natural gas infrastructure can be reused given how much lighter hydrogen is and I assume it needs much tighter tolerances on all the equipment compared to natgas.
Of course recent months changed that since a lot of our gas used to come from Russia. If we went all-in on nuclear we could reactivate (East) German uranium mines that were closed shortly after reunification. But (traditional) nuclear also loses on economic factors, on top of being politically untenable.
Reminds me of my gf who picked cigarettes back up to help her quit vaping.
Nameplate capacity of a new solar plant with a capacity factor of 15% (remember, a cloudy country north of the 50th latitude) is not comparable with nameplate capacity of a well maintained nuclear plant with around 90% capacity factor...
Like what? Surely nuclear is much cheaper than coal if we take at least some of the externalities into account?
Carbon emissions are arguably not even the worst aspect of burning coal…
Only reason nuclear energy is not viable is the people pushing against it, which means less nuclear plants are being built and prices skyrocketing.
If people would have pushed for nuclear energy like they push for wind and solar, then we would have no coal or gas burning plants by now.
- high electricity generation costs
- "I don't want to live next to a nuclear plant"
- If Japan can't handle it securely, why do we think we can?
- Unsolved long-term waste storage location
- Cost for long-term storage must additionally covered by the society
- We are producing radioactive waste that must be securely stored for thousands of years to feed the energy needs of a couple generations, even though there are more sustainable and cheaper alternativesWhat does that even mean? There are no large earthquakes, let alone any tsunamis in Germany. And even if there were, most nuclear plants were not at the sea.