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Comment by azan_ | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what prices would they have if they did not implement sunsetting of nuclear energy. Has to be the worst energy policy decision ever.

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Levelized Cost of Energy for Germany's existing nuclear fleet was roughly 13ct/kwh.[1] The averaged costs (YTD) from the linked article currently stands at 9.71 ct/kwh. So nuclear in the mix would have increased the costs.

[1] https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/877586/4e4dce913c3d88...

LCOE is good for marginal cost (eg: one more solar panel), but fails dramatically at evaluating systemic costs.

A nuclear reactor moves the entire market down, including the costs to the consumer when he buys solar energy.

Here is a UN document explaining it: https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2025-09/GECES-21_2025_...

The SCBOE score is a good idea. However, in the case of Germany, it is often overlooked that the power grid dating from the 1970s, which was built as a one-way system from large power plants (nuclear power plants) to consumers, would have needed to be rebuilt regardless. A large share of the grid costs would therefore have been passed on to consumers even without the transition to renewable energy. Additionally, Germany is located in the center of Europe and is thus a major transit country for electricity. Here too, corresponding capacities would have had to be expanded. The expansion of a European power grid also means that the disadvantages of renewable energy variability can be offset. As the SCBOE system also shows, the individual power plant still accounts for the largest share of costs. Many of the additional factors can actually go down in prices as renewables scale up (nuclear has still to prove that this could work there too). In that regard, LCOE remains relevant.

Even in the peak of nuclear electricity production in the year 2001, coal was dominant source electricity in German grid. (Data for 2001, Nuclear 171 TWh, Coal 293 TWh).

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...

Power grid is not and newer was a one-way system, all the AC power lines, transformers don't care for the direction of the current. It's only the amount of current passing through each power lines, transformers that's important.

The side effect of many electric customers installing PV panels and reducing their demand from grid is that the fuel costs of on-demand power plants decrease, but the fixed costs of on-demand power plants (installation, maintenance) stay the same. These fixed costs have to be recouped in the smaller amount of electricity sold by on-demand power plants, therefor per MWh prices from on-demand power plants will increase for electric grid customer.

For most electric customers it's not possible to disconnect from electric grid and rely just on PV panels and batteries.

Germany is not major transit country for electricity. According to data from 2019 electricity interconnection level for Germany was only 10% .

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

Germany is projected to have import capacity equal to less than 15% of their domestic electricity generation by 2030.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/money-on-the-line-s...

Building of large capacity and long power lines is expensive, therefor many big industrial electric consumers were build near power plants or power plants were build near major industrial customers.

The average electricity price for German households is approximately 32.5 to 34 cents per kWh.

We are not doing an apple to apple comparison if we are not actually looking at what people are paying. The cost of energy is to have the a stable supply of energy delivered at the time that the consumer wants to buy it. The cost of energy production is thus not just the price of producing one unit of energy in isolation, but to have it transmitted in a stable grid at a date and time specified by the consumer. Nuclear energy and solar energy both produce units of energy, but consumers need for transmission, grid stability and time aspects are completely different depending if they buy nuclear energy or solar energy. They are not interchangeable on those aspects.

The 9.71 ct/kwh is the levelized cost of producing electricity from solar. It is not the same as the average cost of consuming energy. Adding nuclear to the mix would not necessary increase costs of consuming energy, even if the average cost of producing energy would go up.

To make a very simplified illustration of this. A energy broker would happily trade 10 units for energy for 1 unit of energy, assuming that they can dictate when and where each unit get transmitted.

The cost of energy is also full lifecycle cost including waste handling, deconstruction and security. I am not saying that everything is that equation for renewables. However, one truth at least in Germany is that we still have not solved the waste problem. Other countries have both better options and also a societal consensus. Here is a study of societal cost of nuclear energy:

Those cost don't even include the full lifecycle societal cost of nuclear energy [0] (25-39 cent by some studies). Sure the renewables also have lifecycle cost we might not pay yet, but in Germany even more important we do not even have a societal and research concesus what to do with the waste (might be much better in other countries)

[0] https://green-planet-energy.de/fileadmin/images/presse/2020-...

No. Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production. Sunsetting the old plants had no negative impact at all on electricity prices, to the contrary, insofar as it made space for more green energy.

Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute. Germany is frequently at the Polish levels of emissions and Poland is famous for huge emissions. Sunsetting would make sense if they could already generate enough green electricity even in bad conditions, which was not and is not the case. It was purely political decision - Germany wanted to be European hub for distributing gas from Russia (that's why tried to convince others than gas is somehow green energy).

Your question was how would the prices be without the nuclear shutdown, talking about emissions now is goalpost shifting. Speaking of politics and not making sense, Poland is still at these levels because they put road blocks into renewables deployment and spend their resources on nuclear plants. If those plans go well they will be at around 35% coal in 2040, which is more than Germany is now.

> Compare emissions between France and Germany during dunkelflaute

Even without dunkelflaute, the absolute bottom per kwh emissions of Germany in summer still doesn't reach the maximum emissions of France in winter.

> Nuclear energy was at the same time very expensive and only a very small percentage of the energy production

The Guardian reports that Nuclear power produced ~20% of Germany's electricity in 2011.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/nuclear-pow...

But 2011 was not the year the nuclear power plants were shut down. However, that is the year your previous commenter was referring to. So what exactly are you trying to say? Incidentally, the electricity that the nuclear power plants had supplied was not replaced by coal power plants, but by renewable energy.

There was not a single moment in time in which all nuclear power plants were simultaneously shut down. The shut down was gradual [1]. 2011 is relevant because it is when the German government decided to phase out its remaining nuclear power plants.

[1] https://www.base.bund.de/en/nuclear-safety/nuclear-phase-out....

How much solar/wind can you really install in the area covered by a nuclear station?

That's not the problem; Germany has enough space to build solar and wind capacity to satisfy its consumption – on average. The problem is storage.

Most definitely not true. Maybe enough area to cover current electric usage, but to truly decarbonize society a lot more renewable energy is needed - for transport, heating, iron industry, chemical industries, fetilizers etc. Massive amounts of electricity is needed unless you export your industries to china.

Heating can also use heat from the ground.

Also the market should be seen more holistic with water energy from the north and sun from the south.

That's prohibitively expensive. And not possible everywhere. And Germany's grid is not ready for heating with electricity.

Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.

Ground heat pumps still use electricity.

Yes but the major energy consumption of a household is heating than transport than utility.

Using ground heat (deep ones) reduces the electricity need sign.

Also if a heat pumpt creates 3-6 the energy from 1kwh, its even more efficient to burn oil and gas to make energy out of it and remote heat than just burning it locally in your burner.

Why not? Germany's total energy consumption is estimated to be around 1-2 TWh/y. This could be generated by photovoltaics covering less than 5% of its land surface.

There are significant problems around rolling out that much capacity quickly enough, and I also don't think nuclear should have been shut down that hastily, but I don't think "only nuclear can cover long-term energy needs" is true in any way.

Wtf are your numbers from, but they are wrong. It's over 2200TWh per year. And it you truly want to be renewable, the numbers go up. Upcycling waste to plastics or using hydrogen to make steel is more energy intensive than using fossil fuels. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/en/indicator-final-energy-con...

Those are total energy numbers, which includes fossil fuels, but those are famously misleading because replacing those with electricity reduces the number of Wh needed. An electric car needs roughly 15kWh for 100 kilometers, a gas powered car typically at least 60kWh for the same distance.

Electrifying reduces energy consumption only in selected use cases. Such as EVs yes. However other usescases such as making steel with hydrogen, plastic fromwaste or fuel for planes require vastly more energy when electrified.

Unsurprisingly the use cases where energy consumption is going down lead on electrification (because it's a cost advantage), so it may seem like electrification reduces energy consumption.

But if you really want to leave fossil fuels behind, the electric consumption will go up, up and beyond.

Electricity consumption will go up* but energy consumption will go down. You will not need 2200TWh of energy in Germany when all is said and done. Heating is one of the top reasons we spend energy and heat pumps are just tremendously more efficient than something like gas heating. You can get the same amount of heating for 3-4 times less energy with a heat pump than gas. So obviously you will not need 2200TWh of electricity like you do now with fossil fuels for energy.

* It's also debatable how much electricity use will actually go up. Logic says this must happen, but logic is not science. We have millions of EVs now in the EU and electricity production is less than it was 20 years ago. Efficiency is a source of energy. If you look at the US for example, it uses almost twice as much electricity per capita than Germany, and I would say they both get the same high level if living. If you look at it that way, Americans can cut their use almost in half and live the same standard of living. This can power a lot of EVs and heat pumps without adding a single GW of new capacity.

Energy consumption in total in Germany will only go down if you decide to export your steel and chemical industries to china. The high temperatures needed by industrial processes can't be achieved with heat pumps.

No. If you electrify residential heating and transportation it will obviously go down. If there are sectors where you can't do that, it will still overall go down because those other sectors will not go up to make up for the reduction. Not sure what your argument is.

The number Lxgr gave, 1-2 TWh/year, is simply completely wrong. Germany's annual electricity use alone is around 500 TWh/year. 1-2 THw/year would be the electricity use of 300-600k average German houses.

Yes, it should be PWh/year.

Yes those are wrong, but I didn't reply to that. The one I did reply to is also wrong :-).

Germany uses “,” as the decimal separator.

But this document does not. Note it says 12.5%, not 12,5%.

1 TWh on the scale of a country is very little - a 1 GW nuclear plant operating continuously would generate over 8 TWh a year.

Nevertheless the back of the napkin math of land requirements for solar check out, so it was probably just a typo and OP meant to say PWh.

Yeah, seems like I got a wire/SI prefix crossed there. The land use should fit in terms of orders of magnitude, though.

5% of the entire German landmass? That seems feasible and desirable to you?!

I have my doubts about short and medium term feasibility, and much more importantly storage and adapting carbon-based industrial processes.

But yes, if all it took was 5% of landmass (which also doesn’t get permanently unusable nor polluted), I’d say that would be a pretty good deal, yeah. This is significantly less than what’s used for livestock farming, to put it into perspective.

Realistically, I don’t think we’ll solve storage fast enough to be able to afford zero nuclear power in Europe.

And of course, you can combine those things sometimes - I've seen cattle munching on grass under solar panels in Baden-Württemberg (state just west of Bavaria).

You can install solar panels over areas that are already developed — rooftops (lol), parking garages, highways, and so on. Some agricultural land even benefits from being covered by solar panels. This has great potential and was first researched in the United States. China is covering water reservoirs with solar panels, which has the additional positive effect of reducing evaporation. And then there is the incredibly large amount of energy that the North Sea, far from any beaches or islands, could provide in consistent wind energy.

Rooftop solar is prohibitively expensive in Germany. My installation would only cover its costs if electricity becomes so expensive that it would lead to complete economic collapse.

No. In Germany, rooftop solar is usually economically attractive, not prohibitively expensive. Especially on a decent roof and if you use a fair share of the power yourself. Verbraucherzentrale(1) says PV systems for private homes are “usually worthwhile” economically, and that self-consumption is the key driver of profitability.

(1) https://www.verbraucherzentrale.de/wissen/energie/erneuerbar...

Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.

Although nuclear energy produces no carbon emissions, it is simply not price competitive with solar and wind in the western world. A culture of safety above all else made nuclear not price competitive. And it would be political suicide for regulators to relax safety given how accidents like Chernobyl or Three Mile Island are etched into the public mind.

And that is very much a good thing.

No it's not. Our nuclear standards are so high that they have caused more radiation to be released because of demand shifting to coal.

That was then. Now we have other options, and they are good.

We're still using lots of coal power, and it's going to take a long time to get near 90% renewable power. So I'd still like to see a lot of nuclear buildout (with a standardized design for many plants, and streamlined permitting for that design).

Building nuclear power plants still takes the longest. Especially if you want to produce the same amount of energy that will be needed in the coming years. Currently, nuclear power plants supply about 9% of the electrical energy used worldwide — and it has taken us from 1950 until today to get there. Why should it suddenly be faster and more elegant now? We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel. Yes, I know China and to some extent South Korea build nuclear power plants faster. But even there, some plants have taken up to eleven years to build, and others that were built quickly only achieve a capacity factor of 60%. At least in China’s case, many of the conditions cannot be directly transferred to Western countries. Space, social and political circumstances, and other factors are simply not the same everywhere as in China. Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.

> We also don’t have the money to pursue both in parallel.

According to what?

We're not spending that much money overall. In particular the US government is putting very little into energy infrastructure considering its spite for renewables.

> Moreover, even China, whose share of nuclear energy in its electricity mix is around 4.5%, is finding that renewables are much faster and cheaper.

The cost of renewables starts to grow when they get over 50% of the power mix.

I'm not opposed to enabling 95+% renewable power by having an army of natural gas peaker plants on standby, but I think nuclear could be cheaper if we gave it an honest try.

Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?

Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.

> Would you like to live next to Chernobyl?

They weren't even acting as a power plant when they did that.

Buy yes I'll take a 1% chance of another 30x30 mile exclusion zone for 100k fewer coal deaths. Even if I have to personally live near it.

> Even with current standards there are a lot of nuclear power plants running just fine.

We could have a lot more of them making power for half the price and still hold them to very safe standards.

And if we focused on what was important while keeping costs under control, we'd get extra safety benefits by affordably rebuilding or replacing plants that were built in the 70s and 80s.

chernobyl affected a lot more then the exclusion zone, most of eastern europe... cancer rates spiked because of it... and it could have been a lot worse.

Effects are long term, hence question if you would live there now?, what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?, would you still live there?, would you live in Chernobyl city now?

When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.

In spite of this, there are reactors built with plans to extend (Romania with Cernavoda for example), but they cost a lot and take a long time to build, plus areas where they can be built are likely limited.

So it's not the standards that are the problem.

> cancer rates spiked

Still preferable to the amount of people killed by coal.

> what would happen if Paris or London or Berlin were contaminated?

You can avoid building adjacent to cities.

> would you live in Chernobyl city now?

Really? I go ahead and say I'll live next to it, so you move the goalpost to living in it?

Screw it. Fine. If it will get a lot of large nuclear plants built outside Asia, I'll trade a promise to live inside any disaster zone caused by not only them but any other plant built in the West this century. Is that good enough for you? Chernobyl itself was not an example of modern nuclear power and I'm not going there.

> When a reactor can mess up a whole country/area long term you need to take all precautions.

Even setting aside the issue of being so cautious you cause harm in other ways, a lot of the precautions don't affect the odds of a big disaster!

> So it's not the standards that are the problem.

There's so much nitpicking on an individual plant basis, so I think they are a big problem.

I didn't see how "there are reactors built with plans to expand" is supposed to show that standards aren't driving the cost?

Nuclear power plants produce CO₂ emissions. The only point at which they do not emit CO₂ is the electricity generation itself. Everything that happens before and after produces CO₂. The amount of CO₂ is debatable, even the major meta-studies (UNECE 2022) point out that across all collected studies, parts of the lifecycle emissions are consistently missing because, drumroll, the nuclear power industry is so non-transparent. Important factors include the mining of uranium ore. If the concentration of uranium ore in the rock is low and the more nuclear power plants are built and the more ore is needed, the sooner such deposits will have to be tapped, mining becomes increasingly CO₂-intensive. The same applies to enrichment. Both processes would greatly benefit if renewable energy were expanded to the point where uranium mining and enrichment could be operated with lower CO₂ emissions.

It's widely accepted that sunsetting nuclear energy had a positive impact on the deployment of renewables, and consequently on the longer term energy prices. It was one of the better energy policy (and environmental, and security) decisions Germany has made in the recent past.

Do you mean the nuclear power that the free market companies very explicitly said wasn't worth doing? That one? Why are we pleading the government to use a horrendously expensive technology that even the free market hates?

Nuclear in 2006 was 160TWh. Coal in 2025 was 93TWh. So a big portion of nuclear would have been replaced by renewables by now anyways (natural gas has a different role in the grid and cannot be replaced bu nuclear).

https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE...

Also a lot of coal plants have been / are used in district heating in addition to electricity. Replacing them is much harder and takes longer than nuclear which is electricity only. Shutting those down was never a short term option.

Calling it the worst decision ever is really funny, when it really is just a question of the order of the transition to renewables. And much of that order was dictated by technical needs.

In a pieceful world, sure. But then there is this [1]. Don't blame the player, blame the game.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...>

Much better idea to just buy oil and gas from Russia /s

Better than nuclear power plants getting hit by drones.

We will have Chernobyl longer than dependency on Russian oil and gas

I suppose you can just compare it to France https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/3mo/daily?signal=electri...

Merit order pricing and the fact that you need fossil peakers will make the price effect completely negligible to consumers. You are comparing the MWh price of slightly more efficient fossil power plants to slightly less efficient fossil power plants.

Maybe 1-4% lower.

Higher

You know that nuclear energy was heavily subsidized?

And they still don’t have a long term storage but therefore rotting barrels with nuclear waste in the interim storage facility Asse which have to be retrieved. Cost estimate around 14 billion Euros.

"long term storage" for CO2 is to spew it into the air where it remains forever... free for Germany, not so much Australia, California, Florida, etc.

CO2 doesn't stay forever in the atmosphere and what's does that have to do with nuclear energy? Building massive power plants also sets CO2 free, same with mining uranium.

Nuclear energy still has a waste problem, is expensive, creates massive single points of failure and given the current situation with the latest advances in drone warfare is a huge security risk while construction and operation.

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