Germany hits 80 GW milestone

If you don't know it, the Fukushima power plant had six reactors. Three reactors had meltdowns. Four of the six reactors were destroyed. The remaining two are in shutdown since then.

The Tsunami was caused by a strong (series of) Earthquake. The Earthquake caused shutdowns of nuclear power plants. throughout the country, not just the Tsunami.

The fact is, and this is not comical, today only 12 of 54 reactors are running. More than a decade later.

> Human overreaction took out the rest of the reactors.

That only shows that you are living in an alternate reality, where you are the expert and you know better than the authorities in a country, where the actual event happened. I doubt that you have any more experience of nuclear technology than the authorities in Japan.

> "Build new ones." Guess your interpretation wasn't correct.

You can't fully read the thing you posted? Look here:

"Under the new policy, Japan will also push for the development and construction of "next-generation innovative reactors" to replace about 20 reactors now set for decommissioning."

So they will lose 20 reactors. They also want to develop a next generation and deploy it. How many? Doesn't say. When? Doesn't say. What technology? Doesn't say. They say "next generation". Clear: 20 reactors will be decommissioned. Unclear: when and how they want to replace them. Many of the reactors to be decommissioned are probably not even running now, since only 12 reactors are online.

My guess: it won't happen. Second guess: if it happens, it'll take >30 years.

The "next generation" (then) EPR in France has cost increase estimations between four and six times. Planning and construction is now ongoing for roughly 25 years. (-> https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_(Kernkraftwerk)#Beginn_der... -> "Bereits 1998 wurde das grundsätzliche Design der Anlage festgelegt.")

The only thing which is sure: it will be late and extremely expensive. Plus: the decommissioning of 20 reactors will cost > 100 billion USD.

Japan is a fast aging country. Where do they get the engineers for all this from? Japan expected to lose 20% of its population until around 2050.

> And a bunch didn't sign but are also expanding at a similar rate, for example India and China.

In reality China brings two coal power plants per week online. Now. -> https://globalenergymonitor.org/press-release/chinas-coal-po...

India has 3% of electricity production from nuclear. Tripling that over the next decades won't change much. 72% of electricity is generated from coal.

Nuclear is too late, too expensive, ...

You just need to check the existing capacity for various power plants and the newly built capacity for power plants from the last years. The trend is clear: nuclear stagnates and struggles to replace aging capacity. Renewable energy is massively expanding, world wide.

We subsidized China's renewable sector with German taxpayer and electricity consumer money. China says thank you!

Alas, renewables are not viable as a primary energy source, due to their intermittency (at best) und unreliability. They need vast amounts of backup.

The dirty little secret of Germany's "renewable energy revolution" is that it only works with lots and lots of backup...and that backup was Russian gas (because Gas plants can ramp up quickly). Or coal.

Neither option is exactly ideal when the purpose of the exercise is to reduce CO2 emissions, and it turns out that Germany, despite many decades and hundreds of billions of investments, has the second dirtiest electricity in Europe. Not the second cleanest, the second dirtiest. After Poland, who just use coal for everything, and are now starting to invest heavily in nuclear.

And of course, the solution is even less ideal when the Gas is coming from a maniacal dictator, who uses that dependency to blackmail. (And who miscalculated that the blackmail would work, and thus invaded Ukraine).

Germany's solution was to reactivate lots of coal and to essentially buy up all the gas on the international market, at sometimes exorbitant prices. But hey, we're rich, so who cares?

Except of course a lot of that wealth is built on industries that are now struggling...and moving.

Furthermore, one country buying up essentially all the gas on the free market is not a scalable solution for multiple countries.

Which is why, after the Ukraine war and its repercussions, basically the entire world re-evaluated nuclear, and found that the mostly imaginary risks and problems were outweighed, dramatically, by the practical advantages.

> Nuclear is at best stagnating in authoritarian surroundings (China, Russia, ...). In the west it is struggling (US, France, UK, ...).

Incorrect.

It is being dramatically expanded all over the world, and the problems with the EPR are outliers, they are not typical. Average time to build nuclear plant has been remarkably steady at 7.5 years since the 1970s (with some fluctuations above and below that line).

> not able to demonstrate safe storage of nuclear waste,

Incorrect.

Storage of nuclear fuel at interim sites is safe and unproblematic. Which is one of the reasons the purely political problem of a permanent site can be kicked down the road by spineless politicians. Technically, safe final storage is completely solved. Finland's Onkalo site just opened, Sweden is also close to completing theirs and Yucca mountain was also ready.

"The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons."

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

One of the reasons nuclear fuel is unproblematic is that there is just very little of it, because the fuel is so energy dense. For example, just the single Herfa-Neurode site in Germany stores an order of magnitude more of both arsenic (enough to poison the entire world several times over) and heavy metals than there is nuclear waste. In containers that are far less safe. And of course arsenic has no half life, it stays poisonous forever.

Last not least, there would be even less nuclear waste (and it would be even less dangerous) if we actually used up the nuclear fuel. Currently, we use less than 5% of the nuclear fuel we feed into the reactor, and throw away the remaining 95+% after it comes out of the reactor. Unsurprisingly, this 95% of the original fuel still contains a lot of energy, and so that is producing the most radiation.

We should be recycling this, but alas fresh Uranium fuel is so cheap that recycling is at best marginally economical at this point.

And since waste disposal is also not an actual problem (just a political one) there is also no real incentive coming from that side either.

> UK:

Yeah, the EPR is apparently a difficult design to build, and these are the first reactors of that type built, so it is at the start of the learning curve and last not least, we let our know-how on how to build reactors slip away, so we are now re-learning how to do that.

The Chinese already finished their copy of the EPR, and the average time to construct a reactor has remained steady at 7,5 years, including and notwithstanding the outliers.

And yes, if it's 7,5 years including the outliers, that means that a lot of reactors get built much quicker, 5 years and less.

As an example, a large percentage of the population believes in homeopathy and most of the health insurers even pay for it(!)

Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false.

> Not in 2022 in France. Not 2011 in Japan.

Nice try, but no cigar. Note the word "almost". Even two times are perfectly consistent with almost always. In fact there were a lot more unplanned downtimes than that. Because unplanned downtimes do happen. They're just not a big deal, because overall, the capacity factor of nuclear is >90%.

You really have to stop cherry picking individual data items that suit your ideology and start looking at the overall data. Nuclear: >90% capacity factor. EE: <15% capacity factor. So it is about as abnormal for EEs to be available as it is for nuclear plants to be unavailable.

That's the actual facts.

And of course, 2022 in France was scheduled downtime. It then took a little longer than scheduled, because they found something during the inspection. As I wrote elsewhere, you can't plan for what you find during an inspection. Because if you could, there'd be no point in doing the inspection in the first place. It's why you do inspections, to find out if there's something you are not expecting.

> [Wind and solar not reliable] ...old arguments.

The fact that they are old does not make them any less true. I don't care what other people said was impossible. This crap only "works" with massive fossil backup, which isn't really an option.

> no, nuclear is not a good backup solution

Totally agreed. Because once you have nuclear as a "backup" you simply don't need the unreliable "primary", as the "backup" is already CO2 free and also cheap and reliable.

And since fossil is not a viable alternative backup either, there is no viable backup. So the whole Energiewende is built on a lie.

Which is why so many countries are now turning around in order not to repeat Germany's mistake.

Germany’s Energy Crisis Dispels Several Myths

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaellynch/2022/08/31/germany...

"Much of its problem is self-inflicted and demonstrates the perils of populist but irrational energy policy."

Amid an energy crisis, Germany turns to the world's dirtiest fossil fuel

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/27/1124448463/germany-coal-energ...

GERMANY’S ENERGIEWENDE A disaster in the making

https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/02/Vahrenholt-2...

Germany's Energy Catastrophe

https://quillette.com/2022/07/14/germanys-energy-catastrophe...

And no, your curves are not meaningful. In fact, as I and others have pointed out before, multiple times, they are utterly meaningless.

That countries were getting out of nuclear 2 years ago is well known und undisputed.

Even FRANCE was getting out of nuclear 2 years ago, betting on renewables.

They no longer are. Between then and now something happed. Something you refuse to acknowledge or even recognize, because it doesn't fit your ideology, and you don't care to look at actual data.

> How about your ideology?

What ideology? I was against nuclear and in favor of the Energiewende. Until I started look at the actual data. In detail. Something you absolutely, categorically refuse to do.

> All the people not of your opinion are following an ideology,

Nope, people who ignore the data are following an ideology.

To quote the Forbes article again:

"Much of its problem is self-inflicted and demonstrates the perils of populist but irrational energy policy."

Populist but irrational energy policy. Ideologically driven.

Glad I could clear that up for you.