In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades
and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the
promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to
commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries"
They apparently don't make economic sense since Uranium is cheap, and there is a risk of proliferation. It's not the case that the technology doesn't work.
It's pretty benign as waste goes. It just sits there and gets less dangerous as time goes on.
You could just keep it in a bunker and pay a crew to dust it off and repackage it when needed for the next 1000 years. But no, for some reason it needs to be taken out of the environment, like in the famous Australian sketch...
I'll be convinced when I'll start to see people campaigning for building storage facilities in their neighbourhoods, rather than generic claims that storage facilities are as safe as it can be.
That's a pretty strange statement. Lots of industrial facilities meet very high standards of safety, say for instance battery and electric vehicle factories, yet we still place them out in the desert? Nobody is campaigning to build those in their neighbourhoods?
That was a semi-sarcastic reference to NIMBY. Specifically, I believe that the same people who state that nuclear waste sites are Perfectly Safe™ would actually reject that idea if the potential problems would affect them personally (figuratively, if the site was in their neighbourhood).
Honestly the waste problem isn't significant except in terms of economic costs. In my eyes the problem is that we try to shove all the waste into a single location. Letting 100% of the waste leak into ground water is terrifying but what if it was spread over 100 locations? Well it sucks but at least each location has 1% of the total risk.
Somewhere in Germany, but hundreds of kilometers from anything worthy - that can happen only in alternative reality where Hitler won and Siberia is now in Germany.
Besides the fact that there is no such place anywhere in Germany or Western Europe there actually is point in that argument. Which is the question who should have nuclear power plants as it is impossible to get rid of them. A country like Germany where tight controls can be reinforced or someone else like say Ukraine or Czechy.
The other point is that fact that you need the distance in case the plant blows up. Which implies it can blow up. Which is true as well (unsinkable Titanic, tsunami safe Fukushima, you name it) as technology can and will fail.
Counter-intuitively, one of the less bad places for an NPP might actually be Pripyat. Making the CEZ even more irradiated is better than creating another.
Pretty nice place for that, yes. Also to store all the nuclear waste. And I mean that in all seriousness.
As a side note, I once saw an emergency plan for the nuclear power nearby where I life (it is still live). Quite a shock to see that in case of a bad enough emergency nobody would have bothered to evacuate me to begin with. I get the logic, but still kind of shocking.
Nuclear plants do not "blow up". This is FUD, pure and simple. People are unreasonably scared of nuclear energy, and we might lose a planet because of this.
Well, there actually is some unreasonable view on nuclear. Especially in Germany. Doesn't change the fact that long term we should get rid of it. The storage of the waste is just to tricky and when not if something goes wrong we talk about serious damage.
That we should IMHO get rid of coal earlier isn't exclusive, so.
Nuclear plants do not 'blow up' this is simply total distortion of reality.
There are ways to help solve the waste issues, and ways to make plants safer.
Given the near infinite latent power in nuclear, and the fact that it's Co2 free ... we should probably be considering this strongly and putting a lot of effort into researching it.
Yes long term we should get rid of it (for fusion), but in short term the priority is climate change. And nuclear fision is a tremendous asset for climate change. There are still huge challenge of course, and we are unfortunately not at all on course to tackle them, but depriving ourselves of nuclear is only going to make things worse.
The reactor of Chernobyl did blow up. Just not like a nuclear bomb, if that's what you meant. Which may be a bad thing, Hiroshima is actually inhabitable.
>People are unreasonably scared of nuclear energy, and we might lose a planet because of this.
People are quite reasonably scared of nuclear energy. What's unreasonable is that they are less scared of global warming.
Your data is not convincing -- in fact, I think it does not address the danger of nuclear and fossil energy at all. Using fossils kill a fairly predictable number of people each year. For a country, let alone humanity as a whole, that is not a danger but a cost.
The reactor that blew up in Chernobyl was because of the design of the reactor itself. Even at the time it was built, the west never would have green lit the reactor design.
The reactor in Chernobyl was a soviet RBMK-type reactor. These haven't been built anywhere for many decades and I don't think even a single one was ever built anywhere in the West.
Chernobyl is the worst possible example. The RMBK reactor is an irresponsible politically motivated design without containment and a highly positive void coefficient, meaning that runaway nuclear reaction is possible. The reactor that blew up also had a design fault (which was fixed), it is quite unstable at low capacity and there was also human error that triggered the accident.
Chernobyl was caused by human error and irresponsibility. We have to assume that the design and operation of all reactors, present and future, will involve these factors. Everything humans do does.
Which again is written by humans. Boeing anyone? All you can do is reducing the risk not eliminate it. Chernobyl was clearly on the high risk side of things. Doesn't mean new reactor types are zero risk so.
Nothing is zero risk. It's just facts of life that we have to deal with. We can do risk mitigation so that the risks are minimized as much as possible. There is also the risk of smog deaths, heavy metal posioning and climate realted disasters if we continue to burn coal. Would you rather have the risk one nuclear accident per 3704 cumulative reactor-years of commercial nuclear power operation [1] or the guaranteed risk of 800,000 premature deaths per year globally [2] attributed to normal coal power operation?
Risk implies uncertainty. A "guaranteed risk" is not a risk.
And of course I prefer a small decrease in life expectancy to the risk of rendering millions of people homeless.
The equation does change when taking climate change in account. But that does not mean renewables are preferred to nuclear merely for "political reasons". Being better than coal does not remotely make it acceptable.
Have you even been to Germany? Everywhere you look there's a building or a construction. Germany is not Russia to have vast amounts of uninhabited land.
What we need is safer fission reactors, preferably unpressurized and without graphite moderator that burns or molten sodium or potassium that ignite in contact with air. Gas leaks. Some molten salts are probably fine, not too corrosive. Water needs to be pressurized but PHWRs (Candu) and smaller PWRs, both US and Russian and French designs have good track records.
Anyone using Michael Shellenberger and his faux front for nuclear lobbying is as an authority is participating in a fraud designed to mislead and misinform. Please don't.
I don't see how that makes sense. How much nuclear does 600 billion € buy you nowadays? 20GW? 40GW? That isn't even anywhere close to the amount of energy Germany needs and the other half would still have to be generated with coal and completely negate any theoretical gains just like it happened with renewables. This crappy situation was caused by government inaction, not by choosing the wrong technology. Germany produces 45% of the energy with nuclear+renewables already but it didn't make a dent in it's CO2 emissions because coal emits 800g of CO2 per kWH and nuclear or renewables at most 12g per kWh (mostly emissions during construction). You know what would help? If they simply switched their natural gas plants instead. Germany would immediately see a 40% reduction in CO2 today (at least in the electricity sector) and since gas plants can do real time load following they wouldn't become obsolete when the renewable percentage rises in the future.
We just asked you yesterday to please stop stoking nationalistic flamewar. If you won't follow the guidelines and post thoughtfully and informatively we'll ban the account.
I read the article and find nothing in it that I would consider nationalistic or that would stoke a flamewar. Can you please explain what you meant? Thanks
It's crazy to move from Nuclear to coal for the sake of the environment. Renewables are great when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but the rest of the time Nuclear is the better choice
There was a radioactive cloud over most of Europe after Chernobyl. It is much harder politically to defend nuclear energy once you lived through that disaster.
There's a cloud of particulants from burning coal and oil over most of Europe--- and it has killed orders of magnitude more people than contamination from Chernobyl.
Even if radiation is your only concern, coal emissions disperse a lot of radiation into the environment! (Still not very much radiation in absolute terms - but more radiation than the nuclear industry emits.)
where do I learn more about the isotope composition of coal? does it vary significantly from deposit to deposit? can they be chemically removed on the basis of their current element identity?
similarily are there significant radioactive isotopes related to the manufacture of plastic products? Regardless if they remain in the plastic or another byproduct? How is such a byproduct dealt with?
Chernobyl was a Gen II reactor. Three Mile Island and Fukushima were also Gen II. [0]
There has never been a meltdown of a Gen III reactor, which is the bulk of the fleet in France.
Gen IV are being designed to be impossible to melt down, and, to use waste from other plants as a fuel source. They do not emit radioactive waste.[1]
[0] "To date, there have been five serious accidents (core damage) in the world since 1970 (one at Three Mile Island in 1979; one at Chernobyl in 1986; and three at Fukushima-Daiichi in 2011), corresponding to the beginning of the operation of generation II reactors. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant
> There has never been a meltdown of a Gen III reactor
yet.
> Gen IV are being designed to be impossible to melt down
Fukushima was designed to be tsunami-safe.
Using NPPs risks rendering large areas uninhabitable. Using fossils risks most of Earth. That does make NPPs a better solution in the short term, but relying on them permanently is still madness.
If you look at the compromises made in the design, I don't think you can really say that this was the case. Even if so, all it proves is that maybe we should build such reactors in safer places, not on fault lines near the ocean.
The people who planned the Fukushima plant made some stupid mistakes. That proves that we shouldn't make stupid mistakes. But that's not possible.
Yes, we can mostly avoid past mistakes. Until there is no accident for a while, people become complacent and start cutting costs. We cannot avoid the mistakes we have neither made yet nor thought of.
What's the timeline for testing and commercialization of these better-sounding designs? We need tested, proven, and affordable large-scale solutions - now.
Im not sure if it's so hard. There already exist a strong narrative that it wasn't so bad,and severe misconduct and negligence must happen for a big disaster. And that in absolute terms it wasn't so bad.
I thinkits easy to politically argue for nukes. They are like planes, when they crash it's a big deal, still comparatively safest method.
I am not a fan of mass producing waste that renders some area or space inhabitable for most of life, for longer than our written history or even our species. Though, maybe it's better than burning fossils as a mean of getting to
something cleaner and safer (and cheap). Tough choice.
I think i'd nuke waste and some disasters over greenhouse I guess, especially runaway.
I am really curious about tidal energy projects, since in principle the cost for the wall is linearly proportional to the circumference, but the energy stored is proportional to the area, hence quadratic in price. Roughly speaking a project 10 times as expensive would store and generate 100 times as much energy...
Unlike solar and wind, the tides are very predictable and 2 cycles per day are guaranteed.
The constant false dilemma between nuclear and coal is poisoning the discussions and blinding us from investing in alternatives...
Did the Japanese project for tidal energy get scrapped? Wikipedia is mute about the current status at [1] and doesn't list the Japanese tidal energy project as under construction at [2] either...
Coal plants spew much more radioactivity into the air and keep doing so. Add on the particulate matter, and we'd be better off with a Chernobyl a year - the death toll from coal is much higher.
It's very popular to criticize the Energiewende as a failure because it apparently failed to reduce CO2 emmissions of the whole country. And of course, it's true that Germany could have had greater reductions if nuclear was kept alive instead of coal. But the Energiewende actually changed Germany. Suddenly everywhere you go you have solar panel farms and many houses have them on their roofs and there are wind turbines. It was a cool time to live in germany to see these projects realized everywhere. They were done in an era where the price of renewables was very high compared to other technologies. The big contribution that Germany has done to the world with the Energiewende is:
* demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables and most importantly
* by buying renewables at high prices, helping the manufacturers to get the price of renewables down. I think it's partially thanks to Germany that renewables have become the cheapest form of elecricity generation this fast, with impact observable around the globe!
From that second point alone I think the Energiewende should be considered a success. Could it have been better? Sure. Is it perfect? No. Do I like the high energy prices now? No. But I'm definitely glad we had it.
Also consider that we here Germany in fact do have a nuclear catastrophy right below our feet in the form of Asse 2.
I agree with you. Germany did not accomplish it's goal of CO2 emissions reduction, but in the process of trying it did a whole lot of other great things. And I hope we will all learn from the experience Germany made and it will contribute to all of our next efforts.
The biggest issue, unintended I assume, is that CO2 certificates are not rare enough (or expensive enough). The result is that coal is actually cheaper than the most modern gas plants. That is based on variable costs, so. In that regard the renewables are basically "free". Which means that renewables are fed in first followed by coal. Which leaves not enough demand for the cleaner and more flexible gas plants. Obviously CO2 emissions go through the roof.
Also I don't get why German does have very limited transfer capacity between Norway,Denmark and Sweden. Those countries have lot cheap renewable energy.
I believe I remember from my masters that there are plans (underway? to be? already in place?) to actually connect the countries. Would be great if that worked out.
IIRC one issue of NorGer(a similar cable) was that German energy law prefers domestic plants over imported electricity.
This of course is a huge risk to investors of submarine cables and was an obstacle in getting it built.
While there are some pretty huge electrical links in place already, there is a large political and public resistance towards expanding this.
For the public, they know that the endgame is more expensive electricity. No good. For local industry, it basically amounts to taking the increasingly large competitive advantage they have of cheap, low emission electricity and just giving it away to Europe.
The generation capacity will idle otherwise. It's probably better to sell the electricity for cheap than let the capacity idle to the point where it rusts and becomes useless.
Oh, it won't idle, no worries. They're running as hard as they can. We use the 'leccy to produce the world's cleanest aluminium, nickel, silicon etc. These industries are what drove construction of the hydroelectric plants in the first place.
People are talking maybe we'll build the next gigafactory for batteries here. There is no shortage of electrochemical industries hungry for that power, and that green image.
> But the Energiewende actually changed Germany. Suddenly everywhere you go you have solar panel farms and many houses have them on their roofs and there are wind turbines. It was a cool time to live in germany to see these projects realized everywhere
Does it really matter to see all those solar panel farms if the end result is they were not much helpful? The money which went into this is absolutely massive and could have been used in a better way to fight climate change.
At least you can say that Germany kickstarted mass manufacturing of PV modules. So even if Germany itself didn't benefit, everybody else did. Including Chinese manufacturers. So I'd argue that the money was well invested.
Long term? Some kind of storage solution in combination with hydro power and, my preference, natural gas as it burns much cleaner than coal.
Short to mid term? Same as above, only that storage will have to be replaced with something else. Since coal is clearly favoured by the system in Germany coal has to replaced by itself. Coal is just the worst alternative. Unfortunately nuclear is no option in Germany, until storage tech is sufficient it could nicely close the gap.
Natural gas is not a sustainable long-term solution. World emissions need to be brought to zero, in the next five years, in order for us to avoid a climate castrophe.
If we are still positive at the five-year mark, that means zero at, say, the ten-year mark, and negative emissions for many decades.
Carbon sequestration is possibly a viable solution. There seem to be solutions in trial (there are numerous questions around it), and even with added costs of capture, it's considerably cheaper and more reliable than other form of energy - moreover, we have it in abundance.
Natural Gas is as viable for the horizon of our future we're able to predict.
In 100 years, every dimension of our tech will have changed so much it's hard to predict. Maybe we solve the nuclear wast problem. Maybe we get fusion. Maybe we have uber cheap solar. Maybe we have dirty easy sequestration. Maybe we have alternatives.
We have already solved the nuclear waste problem. The issue is that nobody wants to bury it in their backyard, so to speak. Waste containers are incredibly safe and secure, and modern fuel waste is much safer than gen 1 fuel waste. People like feel-good shiny solar panels and wind turbines over concrete near-zero emission solutions.
Your answer is basically 'radiation causes rise in cancer which can substantially reduce lifetimes is not a risk'.
I don't see how that's reasonable, I suggest you might have typed something incorrectly.
There are still quite a number of risks inherent in the Nuclear process that require only a few operational failures for disaster.
If very smart countries and operationally efficient countries like Japan screw up the risks, then anyone can. And that there were mitigating circumstances does not change the fact that Japan still had great governance and scientists and persisted with either risky models or a failure to measure the risk.
Basically, we'd need to suck the risk out of every part of the process in order for it to work well.
What's the existential risk? The absolute worst case that I can imagine is that all the waste somehow ends up in the ground water. That would be extremely bad, but localized to the area where the waste is stored.
Existential is as you mentioned: ground water pollution of the entire NE seaboard. Terrorist dirty bomb in NYC that affects 30 million people as the weather carries particles etc.
inverse square law and lack of any volume of any highly active source makes dirty bombs a nonissue. they are scarier than they are effective.
Again, waste storage is incredibly secure and safe. It wouldn't leech into the water. Nuclear subs have sank into the ocean, and, surprise, there wasn't a global disaster.
Well, it has a place in the energy mix because modern gas power plants are incredibly fast to ramp up. So they are perfect to quickly stabilize the grid. As a base supplier not so much.
It's actually very sustainable. Renewable energy production follows a normal distribution. The natural gas plants won't have to produce more than 60% of the electricy during the 10 worst days of the entire year. Therefore a 90%+ reduction in emissions is possible without any storage system at all. Add power2gas technology which will be available over the next decade and it suddenly we are not only carbon neutral, we can also capture it. How are you going to store energy without using gas? Oh and did I mention that 10GW worth of natural gas plants costs less than a 1 GW nuclear power plant? Therefore not running natural gas plants most of the year is cost effective.
The concept of `baseload' is entirely a creation of the system of extremely large thermal plants that are essentially a path-dependent outcome of the electric grid's development. There is no intrinsic usefulness in the concept.
In other words it would be good to stop acting as though the only possible grid is one that looks exactly like the one that was developed in the early 1900's. There are many other arrangements of generation resources and economic structures to pay for them than the existing grid. That is what renewables are moving toward.
well we certaintly aren't moving towards that in Germany so I wonder where they actually are and what that looks like in reality. If everyone else is also just going to burn more coal than ever before all of this is nothing but a very expensive step backwards.
I'm pretty sure if the survival of human race is at stake, money is no object. If someone in a foreign country invented a machine that everyone can buy to make themselves carbon-positive, the logical move for any government would be subsidize the purchase, even if that means great debt: but as the planet continues surviving, the country will go on collecting tax revenue from productive citizens/businesses and will be able to pay its debt back.
Being afraid of government debt if you're a stable country is illogical: it's also why Germany can borrow money at negative interest rates, meaning people would actually rather lend money to Germany and get less back in a few years, rather than park it at a bank. Unlike a business or an individual, the lender has very little risk that the stable country will go bust/get hit by a car and can't earn money to repay the bank.
The point is that while you can spend a lot of money you can't spend infinite money. There's a finite pile of euros. Every euro you spend on something stupid is one less euro you can spend on something smart.
Money is a tool of social organization that lacks instrinsic value. Any time we as a society refuse to do something worthwhile for the sole reason that it would cost too much, that's a capitulation to human stupidity and/or greed.
It's not so much about money, the implication is that making solar panels costs some amount of resources that according to the parent, could possibly be spent in better ways. The money just represents, indirectly, the amount of resources.
The question is, what's the limiting factor: Availability of manpower, natural resources, etc, or 'merely' the money to pay for them? The latter is an artificial constraint.
Take nuclear fusion as an example: Supposedly, this is a case where the projected investments necessary to go from theory to practice just haven't been made. With return of investment only anticipated in the far-off future, it was decided that the money could be spent in better ways.
Obviously money again is only representing some value or resource. You have to compensate workers or else they won't do any work (unless you plan on enslaving them, or have the government provide for all their needs).
The value of money is not artificial, it's valued through a measurement of it's availability vis-a-vis other resources and opportunities.
Surely countries can invest more if those projects are 'more value creating than other investments' and if it's rational, but the notion that countries shouldn't be afraid of debt either is pragmatically no helpful.
All of us are just a few irresponsible financial decisions away from being Greece, Venezuela, Weimar etc.. Stable fiat currencies are a precarious thing, which why we are so cold and 'small c' conservative about it.
As for Germany's problems, it has to do with how we measure value, institutional legacy, and obviously unwillingness to consider Nuclear.
Merkel was never really a pragmatist in the sense we would understand it - she was a political pragmatist, meaning really just 'populist' but more of the centrist type: I believe her Nuclear decision was mostly political.
Of course it's artificial. However, that doesn't mean it's arbitrary, or useless, or can be ignored at will given the current system of socio-economic organization. You're absolutely right that in the world we live in, policy makers have to be careful about financial decisions, or suffer the consequences.
But I believe people should be reminded from time to time that our world is pretty far from the best possible one: There's no particularly good reason that a child has to die from undernutrition every couple of minutes, that fusion research stagnated due to lack of funding, that people go bankrupt to pay for healthcare, etc. As a species, we're just too stupid and greedy to do any better...
The only "currency" I know with a finite money supply is bitcoin. I may be misunderstanding you but there certainly isn't a fixed pile of Euro notes sitting in a vault under the European Central Bank. Money creation is essential to any macroeconomy, just look at the countries in Southern Europe. They have to deal with atrocious unemployment because they cant devalue. Germany and France certainly can. Sure runaway inflation is harmful, but in the choice of inflation in the high single digit contra 20-30% unemployment, my choice would be to lower unemployment.
If your case is that economic output is fixed I would flat out disagree. It's been shown over and over again that investment increases economic output. Which was very much the idea with Germany's Energiewende
There's a strictly finite value base - assets, economic output, etc - to all fiat money supply. It's the underlying value, things priced and transacted in the fiat currency, that make it valuable. You can easily spook the confidence in fiat by doing stupid things to an economy.
Otherwise Venezuela would be the richest country in world history right about now, given their inflation rate.
It works identical to mathematical halving in concept. Yes you can keep going, and no you'll never reach zero. However every time you debase the currency to pay for something beyond your budget, you destroy some of the value underpinning it. You make the assets and transactions in that currency less valuable. You can infinitely subdivide the currency, and each time you do it, you destroy more of the value base. Eventually you're splitting pennies, so to speak. This is especially true in cases where you're printing to pay for something you can't afford (almost always the reason for such printing), so what you're really doing is eating the nation's asset base through the currency debasement.
Just ask Japan, they sliced more than 1/3 off their standard of living by debasing the Yen over the past decade. They had no choice due to their debt situation (they needed to stealth default), however it reduces the value of the assets that are held in Yen, making it easier to eg use dollars (or gold) to buy those assets (whether businesses or real-estate and so on).
So sure, in theory can you infinitely print currency. In practical application, you destroy the value of the things that underpin the currency and the whole scheme self-destructs given enough time and 'printing.' That puts a more realistic cap on actual potential money supply. The fact is, it inherently must be finite. Eventually your money is not worth anything, as you destroy the assets under it. As that happens, people stop accepting the worthless currency, it becomes too expensive to 'print' it and support it, and it becomes a self correcting system, in all cases and without exception.
> Does it really matter to see all those solar panel farms if the end result is they were not much helpful?
Sure, putting them further into the dry south would certainly have improved yields, e.g. putting them into Spain or even further south like DESERTEC envisioned. And still, they produce a non-trivial chunk of German electricity now. Not sure what you are suggesting, compared to stuff like fusion, we actually know that solar works. Also, there is a political component of having them on own soil: energy independence. A lesson learned in the oil crisis.
billions and billions down the drain for symbolism. Mostly private individuals like me payed that via crass energy taxes. It's nice that you get enjoyment out of seeing solar and wind farms but in the end they'll do nothing but serve as testament of the hubris and stupididty of politians.
The initial pre-Fukushima plan to exit nuclear was solid. What ruined it was the blind actionism post-Fukushima.
Also, despite all the fear mongering that renewables will collapse the grid it proofed to be pretty stable and robust. Even high energy industries like the chemical and processing industry adapted pretty well. Some even actively participate in the energy market now. And in case processes can be slowed down or stopped they buffer energy generation peaks practically serving as some kind of storage.
So, Germany has the opportunity to learn a lot about smart grids in highly industrialized environments. It's just that Germany's track record in these kind of things is, well, bad.
> The initial pre-Fukushima plan to exit nuclear was solid. What ruined it was the blind actionism post-Fukushima.
I have a feeling even with the pre-Fukushima plan we would have the same situation now. The thing was that the CDU never committed themselves to the plan. And the energy industry always hoped that one day there will be a CDU-led government that just kills the plan.
So, since the government didn't force them to, they never prepared for the case of the nuclear shutdown actually happening. And when the CDU-led government killed the exit plan it seemed for a short time that their calculations were right. And then Fukushima happened and for the most part we were back to where we were before.
Yes, there was some blind action, but despite stories about all the changes the post-Fukushima plan didn't diverge markedly from the pre-Fukushima plan. Only difference was that the energy companies couldn't hope that a new government will save them since all parties agreed that the exit should happen.
That's true. Maybe the sharp turn the CDU took after Fukushima took them by surprise. I had the impression that back then nobody had a plan or even vague idea if what they were doing. Besides getting voter support.
I also get a warm fuzzy feeling from solar panels and wind farms. But we are losing our planet to climate change, and warm fuzzy feelings do not help. Lowering CO2 emissions does.
Germany could have had zero CO2 emissions by now, if money were invested into nuclear instead of the current efforts. The declaration to move away from nuclear power was misguided and will be regarded as a huge error in the future.
I like to say that the environmental NGOs, politicians etc. have been given the choice between pneumonia (nuclear power) and cancer (CO2 emissions), and they answer "oh no, my grandma died of pneumonia when she was young, so I'll have the cancer".
This deal requires investment at the start but will pay off in the end by lower costs caused by climate change. So what is holding people back? Their perception. They feel like they will die before the impacts will happen. They feel like nobody is doing anything about it so why should they be the first? Humans are built in a way that joining an existing movement is easy but starting one is hard. Germany helped getting the start of the s-curve going.
The renewable subsidies don't cover the cost of a modern nuclear power plant. The 25 billion € per year spent on renewables is just barely enough to construct a single nuclear plant. Other than warm fuzzy feelings that nuclear is superior it wouldn't actually solve the problems Germany is currently facing. Merkel doesn't want to threaten the jobs of coal workers and their communities. Therefore coal plants don't get turned off.
And this is why environmentalism is a failure. It values appearance over results.
So basically it looks good to have lots of Solar and Wind, never mind if it actually does anything useful?
It's called Greenwashing, and if people don't stop doing it this planet is going to get worse and worse.
You realize you've basically said that they only success of this project was reducing the price of PV Panels? If that was your goal there are WAY WAY better methods to do that.
> demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables
That's not what it demonstrated though. It demonstrated than even a highly motivated industrialized nation failed in transitioning to clean energy sources.
I agree that Energiewende is important and that reducing the cost of renewable was sorely needed, but at the same time the decision to close the nuclear plants (rather than coal) was a gigantic mistake.
1) Because it costs a lot of lives. Coal + Lignite in Germany cost 8000 lives per year (funnily everybody also seems to forget that coal release more radiation in the air than nuclear plants).
https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/abst...
By not closing 10GW of nuclear production, Germany could have prevented 2000 deaths by year, so in total 20000 deaths over ten years.
2) Because it gave the impression that a carbon free electricity could be achieved by wind and solar alone. This is not the case: first Germany will only close coal in 2038 (in 20 years!!), and plan to use gas to replace coal at least up to 2050. Gas is way better than goal for air health, but it still release a lot of CO2. 2050 is way too late to be carbon free.
The problem with wind and solar is the intermittence: if you look at the data from
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
you will see that on average wind is at 20% capacity and solar at 10% capacity. So even with batteries to smooth things out (which don't exist at the huge scale we are speaking with), Germany would need a lot more solar and wind that it does. For a peak consumption of around 70GW, this mean it would need 350GW of renewable energy. It is so far only at around 100GW, having added 50GW the last ten years. So at this speed it would still need around 50 years. This is without counting the fact that:
- the energy stockage problem is at least as hard to solve
- solar panel and wind turbines have a lifetime of 20 years, so this does not take into account replacing existing ones
- it is getting harder and harder to find place to put them. In 2018 the rate of installation of new renewables slowed down a lot because of this problem.
3) By contrast nuclear cost less, when taking into account this intermittence problem and the cost of interconnection (which is not counted by the figures usually given); it is a lot easier to interconnect a huge centrale than a lot of small ones. But cost is not an argument anyway when we are talking about climate change (if there was a proper carbon tax at least Germany would have closed coal before nuclear).
It is friendlier to the environment (wind turbine kills a lot of birds, and solar panel take a lot of room from wildlife).
It is as safe as solar and wind, and way safer than hydroelectric and coal.
Banqiao Dam collapse was 230000 deaths. Yet nobody is calling for stopping
hydroelectricity.
Again, Chernobyl was "only" 4000 deaths (high range estimate using a linear
model rather than a threshold model are at 10000-20000 deaths), Fukushima
was 0 deaths (but 1500 due to the evacuation, including zones where the
radiation was the same order of magnitude of the natural one). Chernobyl
cannot happen with modern reactors; a Fukushima style incident could, but
the nuclear operators increased the security of the points of failures that
Fukushima revealed. Again, living near a dam is probably less secure than
living near a nuclear plant. And building and installing solar panels and
wind turbines cost lives too (as do building dam and nuclear plants, and so
on); on average as much as nuclear killed. Yet there is a lot of hysteria
about nuclear plants, because an accident is so much more spectacular and
visi...
>It is friendlier to the environment (wind turbine kills a lot of birds, and solar panel take a lot of room from wildlife).
If you think nuclear power plants don't kill millions of animals per year then you must be living in some kind of fantasy land. Where do you think does the coolant for them come from and where does the waste heat get dumped to?
Some plants have a closed cooling system. And the million figure count fish eggs, which is somewhat cheating. And if you take into account the reduced wildlife area due to solar panel and wind farm needing more space than nuclear plants,
I stand by my statement that nuclear is more environmentally friendly per GWh (but I do concede that solar panels in desert and offshore wind turbines are even better than nuclear for the wildlife).
But in all this we should remember that environmental impact of fossil based electricity is an order of magnitude worse anyway.
The Energiewende is actually one of the reasons I still live in Germany: I want to see how it happens. It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of. And by the way, private energy consumption is heavily taxed (for a good reason), yet energy hungry industries are exempt from it. And they feel the effect: because of the growing effect of the renewable energies, they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices in the world.
There are actually good books that explain how all this works, why there are also short term "unsuccessful" years and how about everything will benefit in the end. And, most importantly: why the Energiewende actually enables a comfortable, good life.
Read this one and it is a compact, very well written book: Energiewende verstehen: Die Zukunft von Autoverkehr, Heizen und Strompreisen https://www.amazon.de/dp/3662577860
I gave it to many friends so they can educate themselves about the topic.
> It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of.
The French can be proud today, consuming electricity with 1/6 of the carbon footprint per kWh, compared to electricity in Germany. And paying half the price, too, compared to what electricity costs in Germany.
Fukushima did blow up. Saw it live on TV. In fact, anything that creates that much thermal energy in a pressurized environment has a chance to blow up.
Fission is a pointless, dirty, expensive technology when it comes to power generation on Earth. It is also not that friendly to the environment once you consider the huge infrastructure you have to operate. But the worst thing is that it is not scalable. Think about exchanging all coal and gas power plants with nuclear reactors, consider the safety and proliferation issues and then tell me that PV with chemical storage is not much simpler solution.
You can blow up a Chernobyl type nuclear plant a year and it'd still be better than coal.
Until we've gotten rid of coal shutting down nuclear and delaying decommissioning of coal to take up the slack involves causing mass death.
Coal is only 'acceptable' because the consequences are not as immediately visible.
PV might well be a better option once we've shut down all fossil fuel plants but in the meantime shutting down nuclear is irresponsible and immoral if it delays decommissioning of other types of plants.
Fukushima had multiple explosions that destroyed the upper levels of reactor buildings, and ruptured the containment of unit 2.
During the three mile island accident there were several days where engineers were sweating bullets because there was a hydrogen gas bubble at the top of the pressure vessel, and they were afraid it would explode. It was only after about a week of effort that they were able to eliminate the H2 bubble.
Every nuclear reactor has the possibility of immense damage due to explosion - steam explosions, explosive gas, and secondary systems such as diesel and electrical system. It is one of the primary hazards that control systems and emergency cooling and venting are there to deal with. Lying to everyone that it's not possible isn't helpful to the nuclear community.
When you blow up a bunch of radioactive material in a large steam explosion you get widespread contamination from fallout and a massive cleanup necessary to recover the scattered material, as well as dealing with the melted core material. That's not "normal".
They blow up in the sense of a dirty bomb. That's a lot worse. It would be great if NPPs just blew up in a nuclear explosion! We could safely use them by making the blast radius a forbidden zone.
> They blow up in the sense of a dirty bomb. That's a lot worse. It would be great if NPPs just blew up in a nuclear explosion! We could safely use them by making the blast radius a forbidden zone.
I do not know how to respond politely to such a ridiculous statement.
Then please explain impolitely where you think I'm wrong.
To clarify: “great” is no absolute, an NPP that generates electricity is obviously better than one that explodes. It also depends on the size of the explosion. A Hiroshima-class explosion would be acceptable, the one of a tsar bomb might not be. Also an NPP that fails like that would still kill its operators and perhaps some unlucky farmers. But compared to the actual worst case, that's negligible.
In terms of existential threats to human life as we know it, it is.
The choices aren't "renewables and nuclear" or "renewables and ponies and magical unicorns." The choice is what proportion of energy do we want from nuclear vs renewables vs fossil fuels.
The best option is reducing energy requirements. After that, though, a large proportion of every unit of nuclear energy you ban goes straight to fossil fuels. Which is death.
Energiewende is no ponies and magical unicorns, it is a quite well thought out system to about zero CO2 ouput in 2050 (except some industries like steel production where fossils will be needed for some time to come until better chemical processes are found). 2050 is not the number that "Fridays for future" want to hear, but still ambitious enough to really make a difference. A lot of new infrastructure has to be built (and is currently built) and paid for (that is why I gladly pay my 28,9 cents/KwH). It is a giant project, but mostly it is using technology we know and can use today. We just have to scale it.
No it is not zero CO2 output in 2050 but about 65% reduction only, or 80% if a 25% reduction of electricity consumption is achieved. This is 1) too late, 2) not even on par with France's electricity C02 production.
And a nuclear accident would not involve closing the whole country, it would involve an exclusion zone of 10-20 km (Fukushima exclusion zone is 20km, but it include zones where the residue radioactivity is <50 mSievert, way less than some natural radioactive places), a whole lot of economic damage (but negligible compared to climate change), and between 0 and (at worst) a few thousand deaths.
When you put it this way, you might as well say that a major accident that takes out half of Western Europe would be neglige in comparison.
German plants are old. There's issues with a few of them. Decommissioning them seems inevitable. The question is whether building new nuclear plants, at probably about 15+ years for the first plant to start operations, is really a better option than investing in renewables?
Again, a major accident would not take out half of Western Europe, this is fear mongering. A major accident would be severe, with a large exclusion zone and a lot of economic damage, but sill kill less than coal kill in Germany each year. And Germany was still constructing new coal power station in 2018!
I am not saying that Germany should invest in nuclear instead of renewable, but in nuclear along with renewable. And yes 15 years is a long time, but still a lot less long than 30 years (and Germany lost 10 years by being stubborn about nuclear).
And other countries that want to do a energy transition should not make the same mistakes as Germany. And political parties in France that want to close nuclear plants are environmentally severely misguided.
Not only that but their move to renewables will be more hassle free as they have enough base load power to compensate for lack of wind and sun, more shoreline and sunnier areas south of Bordeaux.
No, it won't. To compensate for the fluctuating energy output of solar and wind, you need storage and plants that can be throttled quickly, not nuclear reactors that pretty much can't.
> yet energy hungry industries are exempt from it. And they feel the effect: because of the growing effect of the renewable energies, they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices in the world.
Not sure about the whole world, but Germany definitely has one of highest prices for elctricity in Europe:
I just looked up the 2015 numbers for you (I do not have newer data at my desk right now, but the number for Germany is supposed to shrink). In USA and France, energy hungry industries pay 4 cents/KwH, Germany pays 5 cents, China 6, UK 8 and Japan 12. As said, consumers pay more than in most or all other countries. But due to more energy efficient technologies, the actual percentage of income that is paid for electricity stayed about the same.
I believe nuclear power is inevitable. Human power consumption has been growing exponentially, at some point renewable energy will not be able to catch up without causing extensive damage to our ecological system. There are finite amount of renewable energy per sqkm on earth, at some point the area required will begin to erode local ecology. Right now nuclear power appears to be the densest form of energy generation. I agree in the short term renewable energy is a great alternative to coal/natural gas.
I think the history is one of a failed economic subsidy program that accidentally accelerated the PV-industry by a few years.
There were several growing PV manufacturers in germany up to around 2011/2012. In that timeframe the manufacturers were all busy building new factories, but the government noticed that the subsidy program became large enough to be expensive and suddenly severely cut the subsidies.
None of the manufacturers survived that, the remains were sold to the chinese.
So, they've successfully got rid of about 50% of nuclear and 20% of coal by adding a very small amount of gas generation. Presumably the rest is coming from renewables. Sounds like a pretty good progress report.
"Like the Netherlands... no more cars with internal combustion engines will be licensed."
Doesn't make sense, what are they going to use? only Teslas?
I think the whole environment debacle needs a new thinking, less religious and more practical. We don't have unlimited resources to invest in solving those problems, so stop demonising fossil fuels, they are still the force that gives us our energetic freedom. Use the economical advantage and cheap cost to solve the problem step by step rather than declaring unattainable grand targets.
I've always thought it would be more efficient to use a market system with something like a carbon tax and charges for other externalities rather than ad hoc policies for this and that.
165 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadA) dumping in the ground and hope for the best
B) some magic tech will pop which will solve the issue.
They apparently don't make economic sense since Uranium is cheap, and there is a risk of proliferation. It's not the case that the technology doesn't work.
You could just keep it in a bunker and pay a crew to dust it off and repackage it when needed for the next 1000 years. But no, for some reason it needs to be taken out of the environment, like in the famous Australian sketch...
EDIT: The business is ugly, not the fact that it is in the UK.
/end sarcasm. Didn’t work out well for Futurama.
Nuclear fuel reprocessing plus breeder reactors. They burn virtually all of the usable power in uranium leaving little waste behind.
It's an economic problem, and an arms control problem, not a technological one.
We should just build a lot of nuclear reactors somewhere in Germany that's hundreds of kilometers from anything we'd care to lose.
The other point is that fact that you need the distance in case the plant blows up. Which implies it can blow up. Which is true as well (unsinkable Titanic, tsunami safe Fukushima, you name it) as technology can and will fail.
As a side note, I once saw an emergency plan for the nuclear power nearby where I life (it is still live). Quite a shock to see that in case of a bad enough emergency nobody would have bothered to evacuate me to begin with. I get the logic, but still kind of shocking.
For real data on how dangerous nuclear energy is, please look at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-p...
That we should IMHO get rid of coal earlier isn't exclusive, so.
There are ways to help solve the waste issues, and ways to make plants safer.
Given the near infinite latent power in nuclear, and the fact that it's Co2 free ... we should probably be considering this strongly and putting a lot of effort into researching it.
The reactor of Chernobyl did blow up. Just not like a nuclear bomb, if that's what you meant. Which may be a bad thing, Hiroshima is actually inhabitable.
>People are unreasonably scared of nuclear energy, and we might lose a planet because of this.
People are quite reasonably scared of nuclear energy. What's unreasonable is that they are less scared of global warming.
Your data is not convincing -- in fact, I think it does not address the danger of nuclear and fossil energy at all. Using fossils kill a fairly predictable number of people each year. For a country, let alone humanity as a whole, that is not a danger but a cost.
Nuclear plants do not "blow up".
Chernobyl was a coal plant them I guess.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
1. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2016.1...
2. https://endcoal.org/health/
The equation does change when taking climate change in account. But that does not mean renewables are preferred to nuclear merely for "political reasons". Being better than coal does not remotely make it acceptable.
What we need is safer fission reactors, preferably unpressurized and without graphite moderator that burns or molten sodium or potassium that ignite in contact with air. Gas leaks. Some molten salts are probably fine, not too corrosive. Water needs to be pressurized but PHWRs (Candu) and smaller PWRs, both US and Russian and French designs have good track records.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
buried the lede there
similarily are there significant radioactive isotopes related to the manufacture of plastic products? Regardless if they remain in the plastic or another byproduct? How is such a byproduct dealt with?
There has never been a meltdown of a Gen III reactor, which is the bulk of the fleet in France.
Gen IV are being designed to be impossible to melt down, and, to use waste from other plants as a fuel source. They do not emit radioactive waste.[1]
[0] "To date, there have been five serious accidents (core damage) in the world since 1970 (one at Three Mile Island in 1979; one at Chernobyl in 1986; and three at Fukushima-Daiichi in 2011), corresponding to the beginning of the operation of generation II reactors. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant
[1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fue...
yet.
> Gen IV are being designed to be impossible to melt down
Fukushima was designed to be tsunami-safe.
Using NPPs risks rendering large areas uninhabitable. Using fossils risks most of Earth. That does make NPPs a better solution in the short term, but relying on them permanently is still madness.
If you look at the compromises made in the design, I don't think you can really say that this was the case. Even if so, all it proves is that maybe we should build such reactors in safer places, not on fault lines near the ocean.
Yes, we can mostly avoid past mistakes. Until there is no accident for a while, people become complacent and start cutting costs. We cannot avoid the mistakes we have neither made yet nor thought of.
Gen IIIs seem to have a short and small operating history. That's helped their success rate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...
Gen IV are being designed...
What's the timeline for testing and commercialization of these better-sounding designs? We need tested, proven, and affordable large-scale solutions - now.
As for France, they've managed to keep their problems very quiet for a long time, so ... how could we be sure? http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2017/ph241/dudzinski2/
Putting safety concerns to one side, the many, many costs of nuclear are not getting lower.
I thinkits easy to politically argue for nukes. They are like planes, when they crash it's a big deal, still comparatively safest method.
I am not a fan of mass producing waste that renders some area or space inhabitable for most of life, for longer than our written history or even our species. Though, maybe it's better than burning fossils as a mean of getting to something cleaner and safer (and cheap). Tough choice.
I think i'd nuke waste and some disasters over greenhouse I guess, especially runaway.
Unlike solar and wind, the tides are very predictable and 2 cycles per day are guaranteed.
The constant false dilemma between nuclear and coal is poisoning the discussions and blinding us from investing in alternatives...
Did the Japanese project for tidal energy get scrapped? Wikipedia is mute about the current status at [1] and doesn't list the Japanese tidal energy project as under construction at [2] either...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan#Ocean_energy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tidal_power_stations
* demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables and most importantly
* by buying renewables at high prices, helping the manufacturers to get the price of renewables down. I think it's partially thanks to Germany that renewables have become the cheapest form of elecricity generation this fast, with impact observable around the globe!
From that second point alone I think the Energiewende should be considered a success. Could it have been better? Sure. Is it perfect? No. Do I like the high energy prices now? No. But I'm definitely glad we had it.
Also consider that we here Germany in fact do have a nuclear catastrophy right below our feet in the form of Asse 2.
For the public, they know that the endgame is more expensive electricity. No good. For local industry, it basically amounts to taking the increasingly large competitive advantage they have of cheap, low emission electricity and just giving it away to Europe.
People are talking maybe we'll build the next gigafactory for batteries here. There is no shortage of electrochemical industries hungry for that power, and that green image.
Does it really matter to see all those solar panel farms if the end result is they were not much helpful? The money which went into this is absolutely massive and could have been used in a better way to fight climate change.
Short to mid term? Same as above, only that storage will have to be replaced with something else. Since coal is clearly favoured by the system in Germany coal has to replaced by itself. Coal is just the worst alternative. Unfortunately nuclear is no option in Germany, until storage tech is sufficient it could nicely close the gap.
If we are still positive at the five-year mark, that means zero at, say, the ten-year mark, and negative emissions for many decades.
Natural gas has no place in this long-term.
Carbon sequestration is possibly a viable solution. There seem to be solutions in trial (there are numerous questions around it), and even with added costs of capture, it's considerably cheaper and more reliable than other form of energy - moreover, we have it in abundance.
Natural Gas is as viable for the horizon of our future we're able to predict.
In 100 years, every dimension of our tech will have changed so much it's hard to predict. Maybe we solve the nuclear wast problem. Maybe we get fusion. Maybe we have uber cheap solar. Maybe we have dirty easy sequestration. Maybe we have alternatives.
1) Long term storage has some existential risks. Over very long time horizons, these risks become real.
2) Transportation, processing and storage: all of this operational stuff is totally ripe for accidents.
I don't see how that's reasonable, I suggest you might have typed something incorrectly.
There are still quite a number of risks inherent in the Nuclear process that require only a few operational failures for disaster.
If very smart countries and operationally efficient countries like Japan screw up the risks, then anyone can. And that there were mitigating circumstances does not change the fact that Japan still had great governance and scientists and persisted with either risky models or a failure to measure the risk.
Basically, we'd need to suck the risk out of every part of the process in order for it to work well.
I think it's possible.
Again, waste storage is incredibly secure and safe. It wouldn't leech into the water. Nuclear subs have sank into the ocean, and, surprise, there wasn't a global disaster.
In other words it would be good to stop acting as though the only possible grid is one that looks exactly like the one that was developed in the early 1900's. There are many other arrangements of generation resources and economic structures to pay for them than the existing grid. That is what renewables are moving toward.
That looks like progress to me. Why do you say "everyone else is just going to burn more coal?"
Being afraid of government debt if you're a stable country is illogical: it's also why Germany can borrow money at negative interest rates, meaning people would actually rather lend money to Germany and get less back in a few years, rather than park it at a bank. Unlike a business or an individual, the lender has very little risk that the stable country will go bust/get hit by a car and can't earn money to repay the bank.
Take nuclear fusion as an example: Supposedly, this is a case where the projected investments necessary to go from theory to practice just haven't been made. With return of investment only anticipated in the far-off future, it was decided that the money could be spent in better ways.
Surely countries can invest more if those projects are 'more value creating than other investments' and if it's rational, but the notion that countries shouldn't be afraid of debt either is pragmatically no helpful.
All of us are just a few irresponsible financial decisions away from being Greece, Venezuela, Weimar etc.. Stable fiat currencies are a precarious thing, which why we are so cold and 'small c' conservative about it.
As for Germany's problems, it has to do with how we measure value, institutional legacy, and obviously unwillingness to consider Nuclear.
Merkel was never really a pragmatist in the sense we would understand it - she was a political pragmatist, meaning really just 'populist' but more of the centrist type: I believe her Nuclear decision was mostly political.
But I believe people should be reminded from time to time that our world is pretty far from the best possible one: There's no particularly good reason that a child has to die from undernutrition every couple of minutes, that fusion research stagnated due to lack of funding, that people go bankrupt to pay for healthcare, etc. As a species, we're just too stupid and greedy to do any better...
If your case is that economic output is fixed I would flat out disagree. It's been shown over and over again that investment increases economic output. Which was very much the idea with Germany's Energiewende
Otherwise Venezuela would be the richest country in world history right about now, given their inflation rate.
It works identical to mathematical halving in concept. Yes you can keep going, and no you'll never reach zero. However every time you debase the currency to pay for something beyond your budget, you destroy some of the value underpinning it. You make the assets and transactions in that currency less valuable. You can infinitely subdivide the currency, and each time you do it, you destroy more of the value base. Eventually you're splitting pennies, so to speak. This is especially true in cases where you're printing to pay for something you can't afford (almost always the reason for such printing), so what you're really doing is eating the nation's asset base through the currency debasement.
Just ask Japan, they sliced more than 1/3 off their standard of living by debasing the Yen over the past decade. They had no choice due to their debt situation (they needed to stealth default), however it reduces the value of the assets that are held in Yen, making it easier to eg use dollars (or gold) to buy those assets (whether businesses or real-estate and so on).
So sure, in theory can you infinitely print currency. In practical application, you destroy the value of the things that underpin the currency and the whole scheme self-destructs given enough time and 'printing.' That puts a more realistic cap on actual potential money supply. The fact is, it inherently must be finite. Eventually your money is not worth anything, as you destroy the assets under it. As that happens, people stop accepting the worthless currency, it becomes too expensive to 'print' it and support it, and it becomes a self correcting system, in all cases and without exception.
It shouldn't be, but unfortunately, it very much is.
Sure, putting them further into the dry south would certainly have improved yields, e.g. putting them into Spain or even further south like DESERTEC envisioned. And still, they produce a non-trivial chunk of German electricity now. Not sure what you are suggesting, compared to stuff like fusion, we actually know that solar works. Also, there is a political component of having them on own soil: energy independence. A lesson learned in the oil crisis.
Also, despite all the fear mongering that renewables will collapse the grid it proofed to be pretty stable and robust. Even high energy industries like the chemical and processing industry adapted pretty well. Some even actively participate in the energy market now. And in case processes can be slowed down or stopped they buffer energy generation peaks practically serving as some kind of storage.
So, Germany has the opportunity to learn a lot about smart grids in highly industrialized environments. It's just that Germany's track record in these kind of things is, well, bad.
I have a feeling even with the pre-Fukushima plan we would have the same situation now. The thing was that the CDU never committed themselves to the plan. And the energy industry always hoped that one day there will be a CDU-led government that just kills the plan.
So, since the government didn't force them to, they never prepared for the case of the nuclear shutdown actually happening. And when the CDU-led government killed the exit plan it seemed for a short time that their calculations were right. And then Fukushima happened and for the most part we were back to where we were before.
Yes, there was some blind action, but despite stories about all the changes the post-Fukushima plan didn't diverge markedly from the pre-Fukushima plan. Only difference was that the energy companies couldn't hope that a new government will save them since all parties agreed that the exit should happen.
Germany could have had zero CO2 emissions by now, if money were invested into nuclear instead of the current efforts. The declaration to move away from nuclear power was misguided and will be regarded as a huge error in the future.
This deal requires investment at the start but will pay off in the end by lower costs caused by climate change. So what is holding people back? Their perception. They feel like they will die before the impacts will happen. They feel like nobody is doing anything about it so why should they be the first? Humans are built in a way that joining an existing movement is easy but starting one is hard. Germany helped getting the start of the s-curve going.
So basically it looks good to have lots of Solar and Wind, never mind if it actually does anything useful?
It's called Greenwashing, and if people don't stop doing it this planet is going to get worse and worse.
You realize you've basically said that they only success of this project was reducing the price of PV Panels? If that was your goal there are WAY WAY better methods to do that.
> demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables
That's not what it demonstrated though. It demonstrated than even a highly motivated industrialized nation failed in transitioning to clean energy sources.
1) Because it costs a lot of lives. Coal + Lignite in Germany cost 8000 lives per year (funnily everybody also seems to forget that coal release more radiation in the air than nuclear plants). https://www.thelancet.com/article/S0140-6736(07)61253-7/abst...
By contrast Chernobyl was 4000 deaths https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2005/pr38/en/
By not closing 10GW of nuclear production, Germany could have prevented 2000 deaths by year, so in total 20000 deaths over ten years.
2) Because it gave the impression that a carbon free electricity could be achieved by wind and solar alone. This is not the case: first Germany will only close coal in 2038 (in 20 years!!), and plan to use gas to replace coal at least up to 2050. Gas is way better than goal for air health, but it still release a lot of CO2. 2050 is way too late to be carbon free.
The problem with wind and solar is the intermittence: if you look at the data from https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... you will see that on average wind is at 20% capacity and solar at 10% capacity. So even with batteries to smooth things out (which don't exist at the huge scale we are speaking with), Germany would need a lot more solar and wind that it does. For a peak consumption of around 70GW, this mean it would need 350GW of renewable energy. It is so far only at around 100GW, having added 50GW the last ten years. So at this speed it would still need around 50 years. This is without counting the fact that: - the energy stockage problem is at least as hard to solve - solar panel and wind turbines have a lifetime of 20 years, so this does not take into account replacing existing ones - it is getting harder and harder to find place to put them. In 2018 the rate of installation of new renewables slowed down a lot because of this problem.
3) By contrast nuclear cost less, when taking into account this intermittence problem and the cost of interconnection (which is not counted by the figures usually given); it is a lot easier to interconnect a huge centrale than a lot of small ones. But cost is not an argument anyway when we are talking about climate change (if there was a proper carbon tax at least Germany would have closed coal before nuclear).
It is friendlier to the environment (wind turbine kills a lot of birds, and solar panel take a lot of room from wildlife).
It is as safe as solar and wind, and way safer than hydroelectric and coal. Banqiao Dam collapse was 230000 deaths. Yet nobody is calling for stopping hydroelectricity.
Again, Chernobyl was "only" 4000 deaths (high range estimate using a linear model rather than a threshold model are at 10000-20000 deaths), Fukushima was 0 deaths (but 1500 due to the evacuation, including zones where the radiation was the same order of magnitude of the natural one). Chernobyl cannot happen with modern reactors; a Fukushima style incident could, but the nuclear operators increased the security of the points of failures that Fukushima revealed. Again, living near a dam is probably less secure than living near a nuclear plant. And building and installing solar panels and wind turbines cost lives too (as do building dam and nuclear plants, and so on); on average as much as nuclear killed. Yet there is a lot of hysteria about nuclear plants, because an accident is so much more spectacular and visi...
If you think nuclear power plants don't kill millions of animals per year then you must be living in some kind of fantasy land. Where do you think does the coolant for them come from and where does the waste heat get dumped to?
But in all this we should remember that environmental impact of fossil based electricity is an order of magnitude worse anyway.
There are actually good books that explain how all this works, why there are also short term "unsuccessful" years and how about everything will benefit in the end. And, most importantly: why the Energiewende actually enables a comfortable, good life.
I gave it to many friends so they can educate themselves about the topic.
The French can be proud today, consuming electricity with 1/6 of the carbon footprint per kWh, compared to electricity in Germany. And paying half the price, too, compared to what electricity costs in Germany.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192091...
Fission is a pointless, dirty, expensive technology when it comes to power generation on Earth. It is also not that friendly to the environment once you consider the huge infrastructure you have to operate. But the worst thing is that it is not scalable. Think about exchanging all coal and gas power plants with nuclear reactors, consider the safety and proliferation issues and then tell me that PV with chemical storage is not much simpler solution.
Until we've gotten rid of coal shutting down nuclear and delaying decommissioning of coal to take up the slack involves causing mass death.
Coal is only 'acceptable' because the consequences are not as immediately visible.
PV might well be a better option once we've shut down all fossil fuel plants but in the meantime shutting down nuclear is irresponsible and immoral if it delays decommissioning of other types of plants.
Chernobyl's unit 4 was destroyed by an explosion.
Fukushima had multiple explosions that destroyed the upper levels of reactor buildings, and ruptured the containment of unit 2.
During the three mile island accident there were several days where engineers were sweating bullets because there was a hydrogen gas bubble at the top of the pressure vessel, and they were afraid it would explode. It was only after about a week of effort that they were able to eliminate the H2 bubble.
Every nuclear reactor has the possibility of immense damage due to explosion - steam explosions, explosive gas, and secondary systems such as diesel and electrical system. It is one of the primary hazards that control systems and emergency cooling and venting are there to deal with. Lying to everyone that it's not possible isn't helpful to the nuclear community.
I do not know how to respond politely to such a ridiculous statement.
To clarify: “great” is no absolute, an NPP that generates electricity is obviously better than one that explodes. It also depends on the size of the explosion. A Hiroshima-class explosion would be acceptable, the one of a tsar bomb might not be. Also an NPP that fails like that would still kill its operators and perhaps some unlucky farmers. But compared to the actual worst case, that's negligible.
In terms of existential threats to human life as we know it, it is.
The choices aren't "renewables and nuclear" or "renewables and ponies and magical unicorns." The choice is what proportion of energy do we want from nuclear vs renewables vs fossil fuels.
The best option is reducing energy requirements. After that, though, a large proportion of every unit of nuclear energy you ban goes straight to fossil fuels. Which is death.
And a nuclear accident would not involve closing the whole country, it would involve an exclusion zone of 10-20 km (Fukushima exclusion zone is 20km, but it include zones where the residue radioactivity is <50 mSievert, way less than some natural radioactive places), a whole lot of economic damage (but negligible compared to climate change), and between 0 and (at worst) a few thousand deaths.
German plants are old. There's issues with a few of them. Decommissioning them seems inevitable. The question is whether building new nuclear plants, at probably about 15+ years for the first plant to start operations, is really a better option than investing in renewables?
I am not saying that Germany should invest in nuclear instead of renewable, but in nuclear along with renewable. And yes 15 years is a long time, but still a lot less long than 30 years (and Germany lost 10 years by being stubborn about nuclear).
And other countries that want to do a energy transition should not make the same mistakes as Germany. And political parties in France that want to close nuclear plants are environmentally severely misguided.
Not sure about the whole world, but Germany definitely has one of highest prices for elctricity in Europe:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
That's not what I was arguing with. Your statement about "they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices in the world" is just terribly untrue.
That has to stop. Power generation cannot grow exponentially forever
I think the history is one of a failed economic subsidy program that accidentally accelerated the PV-industry by a few years.
There were several growing PV manufacturers in germany up to around 2011/2012. In that timeframe the manufacturers were all busy building new factories, but the government noticed that the subsidy program became large enough to be expensive and suddenly severely cut the subsidies. None of the manufacturers survived that, the remains were sold to the chinese.
No reason not to complete the picture, I guess:
Doesn't make sense, what are they going to use? only Teslas? I think the whole environment debacle needs a new thinking, less religious and more practical. We don't have unlimited resources to invest in solving those problems, so stop demonising fossil fuels, they are still the force that gives us our energetic freedom. Use the economical advantage and cheap cost to solve the problem step by step rather than declaring unattainable grand targets.