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Comment by jansan | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen has their own plans with its subsidary PowerCo, and since EV adoption is slower than expected, they may (partly) drop Northvolt in favor of PowerCo. Interestingly they canceled their plan for a second battery plant in Germany due to high energy costs.

Regarding Germany: I still do not understand how you want to electrify everything, reduce CO2 emissions, and then shut down fully working nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy supply crisis. This is completely beyond me. I know there are people defending this decision, but I can only attribute this to malice or idiocy.

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> I know there are people defending this decision, but I can only attribute this to malice or idiocy.

Import energy from abroad, you get to claim that you're all so Clean and Ecological[0], while all you've done is shift the dirty coal plants to some other countries that don't care and will happily take all the blame in the global statistics, as long as you keep paying them.

See also: manufacturing, another case where western nations outsource the dirty and energy-intensive parts, import finished products, and get lauded for "reducing" their footprints.

Accounting trickery, is all.

[0] - A claim that's belied by opposition to nuclear energy alone.

> shut down fully working nuclear power plants in the middle of an energy supply crisis

Yes it is a stupid decision, but your timeline is out a little - 2011 is when they decided to shut down the power plants, the energy crisis was 2022. The amount of work that doesnt get done when you are 2/3/4 years from end of life makes reversing the decision on the day of shutdown not as easy on the ground as it is from an armchair.

In a crisis you sometimes have to go the non-easy way. They built terminals for fracking gas in record time, so I am sure they could have found a way to keep those nuclear power plants running for a few more years.

“I am sure” of many things I have no idea about, too. It’s called Dunning Kruger effect.

> I still do not understand...

Renewables? + some batteries + gas peaker as winter backup

The nuclear plants weren't fully working anymore but taken into planned shutdown 10 years after the decision was made to shut them down. That people think Nuclear is a power technology where you can just nilly-willy decide to continue running is the real idiocy.

Energy prices are now lower than before the run-up to the Russian war of aggression.

The decision to fade out nuclear power was made under the assumption of having an alternative reliable energy source (namely Russian gas). If your main assumption suddenly blows up (literally), do you really claim that stubbornly sticking to your original plan is the right way to go?

I'm always amazed when I am reminded that there is still a pipeline through Ukraine moving Russian gas to Europe.

What if they didn't stubbornly stick to a plan but instead considered all the alternatives and refurbishing a nearly run down nuclear plant wasn't the best option?

> The government commissioned a so-called “stress test” in the summer of 2022 to see whether it would make sense to let the remaining reactors run several months longer to ensure grid stability during the winter of 2022/23. It found that a limited runtime extension could make sense for supporting electricity production. Chancellor Olaf Scholz ultimately decided that the three remaining nuclear plants in the country receive a runtime extension of about three months, until 15 April 2023, to act as a backup during the crisis. The government later ruled out any further extensions and plant operators said that letting the plants run longer would not be possible from a technical point of view, even if this was desired politically.

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/qa-why-germany-phasing-...

By the time Putin started his war there were only 3 reactors left. Their run-time were extended for 3 1/2 months which apparently conserved roughly 2% of annual German gas consumption.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomausstieg#Seit_2022:_Diskus...

The reality is that a majority of Germans don't want Nuclear power. Seeing how little other countries in the west are building it seems that sentiment is pretty common.

You are absolutely right, that Russia required us (and many others) to rethink many assumptions. The German answer was to build out LNG terminals and double down on renewables.

I attribute it to idiocy, but not on the part of Germany today. Sibling comments have already pointed out that a shutdown of nuclear was already decided in 2011 and that you can't just reverse that decision on a whim. I want to add that the shutdown is a culmination of over 60 years of lobbying, first by the Green Party when they were still single-issue radicals in parliament, then by environmental groups like Greenpeace. I like to believe that their intentions have always been good and noble, but to prioritize nuclear over the real polluter (fossil fuels) has always struck me as idiotic. It didn't help that the media constantly painted the search for a final resting place for nuclear waste as an insurmountable crisis, and of course Fukushima basically did the rest.

>you can't just reverse that decision on a whim.

You definitely can when your own existence/security is under threat.

In such cases, you can override people's idealist wishes since keeping borders defended and citizens safe, fed and warm in trouble times is more important to maintaining a stable economy and society long term, than rolling with the idealist fantasies of not using nuclear energy that people wished for when times were good.

But 30 years of not taking military/defense and energy self sufficiency seriously, is costing the EU taxpayer greatly now. It's a tragedy of the commons.

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