Yeah, this has been known for a long time now that Germany is planning to shut down their nuclear plants. I have no clue why. There is a country in Eastern Europe and >60% of their electricity is from their nuclear power plants, and they are extending it. Imagine this country exporting electricity to Germany.
Anyways, I believe it was a pretty shitty idea to say no to nuclear.
Fun fact: three brave men from the Chernobyl mini-series that swimmed in radioactive water, drank vodka and died IRL lived happily ever after and one of them became chief nuclear scientist in Ukraine.
Survivors of Fukushima? You mean all of them? Nobody died at Fukushima...or Three Mile Island. President Carter visited it while it was still melting down.
Yes, people died at Chernobyl, and we all know why (incompetence and lies). Are you suggesting the German nuclear industry is comparable to the Soviets?
Not a big fan of nuclear because of security and waste disposal issues, but quoting 3 accidents over a span of 60 years as a reason for a blanket ban on a whole class of energy production technologies is hyper safetyism.
I err on the side of hyper safetyism when it comes to nuclear, as when it goes wrong, it can make areas permanently uninhabitable.
Not to say that I advocate for a blanket ban.
But I am concerned that a Chernobyl could happen in China, if the same human failure occurs again, in a command economy, with people afraid to speak up regarding safety issues vs targets.
Much of the Earth's surface has always been permanently uninhabitable for reasons unrelated to nuclear accidents. Closing off a few more small areas per century is an acceptable risk.
People still live in the Chernobyl exclusion zone and always has as many didn't move when the disaster happened. And it gets safer every year, many work in it, nature thrives in it etc.
The parts that will be uninhabitable for the distant future is really tiny, most of it is already safer than many other parts people live in where natural disasters happens regularly. Living near a coal plant is much worse for your health than living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Edit: If you don't believe me you can read about current radiation levels in Pripyat here:
Below 1 micro Sievert per hour is normal and harmless to live in, most of Pripyat is already there but some areas like the reactor and the graveyard used during clean-up are much higher. But still the town was just a few square kilometres, anything outside of that is basically safe. Just that Ukraine doesn't need this area for anything, they have no reason to open it up.
We should call this the "enable Putin" and "destroy the climate" plan.
Honestly, I think we should declare a 50% tax on the gas going through the new Putin Nordstream 2 pipeline and direct the proceeds to NATO. Prices in externalities of gas usage and gets the EU closer to their NATO commitment.
A bully (Russia) comes up to a child (Ukraine) and kicks them in the shin really hard (Crimea). Then grabs them by the shirt and rears back like they're about to punch the kid.
You're right, why waste money teaching the kid Aikido when we could instead spend that money on school tutors to try to get them into schools that don't have bullies.
Why not just mix human rights in China also into the discussion? Make everybody into vegans cause animal cruelty? Police brutality? School crisis?
Obviously different problems are always best tackled in combination! Practically guarantees success. /s
And obviously geopolitical bullies should just not be talked to. Hm so let's see who is left to talk to then. Russia, China, U.S., NATO, none of those won't an option anymore. Good to keep your principles. And good luck doing anything good to the climate with the strategy of only talking to yourself (assuming your country isn't a geopolitical bully itself, which is likely quite a stretch, given the odds.)
What good would a military do? The US has a more powerful military than russia, China and Europe put together, yet lost in iraq and afghanistan.
A better solution would be to stop giving russia money for its gas. That means not shutting down nuclear plants, and instead building many many more power plants to make Europe energy independent
This makes no sense. The gas going through the pipeline is already expensive and it's already used to heat poor peoples homes. Meanwhile, Nato's military power is pretty much irrelevant if the countries of Nato can't piss of Russia because of fear that Putin will close down the pipeline in the middle of winter and watch pensioners freeze to death in their homes.
The single most important move to save the EU from Putin and to decarbonise is to fund green energy like wind, solar and particularly invest in energy storage solutions to smooth out unreliable sources. It's very difficult to compete with Gas turbines in terms of supply and responsiveness.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I’m not challenging the idea that people don’t want turbines built on or near their property. That might well be the case.
I specifically want a source to substantiate the claim you made with your first eight words.
Sad to see Germany continue to shut down Nuclear while having to greatly expand coal usage because their wind farms significantly under produce due to unexpected weather patterns. (As much as +40% coal generation in the past two years, and -20% wind)
And they're replacing it with... gas! Great, another carbon based fuel that is dramatically inferior to Nuclear in energy density, environment impact, and national security.
They'll replace it with renewables and energy storage solutions. Not instantly of course, but they'll keep building out capacity. There are also interconnections to other countries that can serve as help when needed. These developments makes pure baseload technologies less economical since you need something that can adapt to the inherent variability.
this is sophistry. "necessary" means sufficient to cover the shortfall from the lack of nuclear baseload. the effect of shutting down nuke plants will be to burn more gas, there is no way to dispute this.
Gas and nuclear don't fulfill the same purpose. It's not like they'll stop building out solar and wind and storage solutions. If your energy system depends on renewables and there is not enough storage (or other geographical interconnected solutions) then you'll need something like gas to quickly spin up and down if the demand requires it. Maybe new nuclear plants will be able to do this too, but right now they can't match gas.
I live in Germany and I wonder, what the consequences will be of shutting down both coal and nuclear in very short time. My guess is, we will pay for nuclear energy from France and coal energy from Poland when wind slows down.
The new government tries to accelerate the construction of renewable energy but I think their plans will fail because of worker shortage and supply chain problems.
France will build more nuclear, and in the long run solidify its position as a huge exporter of electricity at high rates when wind is low. Weird arbitrage opportunity for them as the neighbors go all in on wind.
Not quite. They're reducing their dependency on nuclear as well. Sure they might build some new reactors but they'll also close some old ones. It's expected that they will close more reactors than they will build.
The overall radioactive waste in the environment will go down if coal plants in EU get replaced with nuclear plants in France, even if there would be future accidents at a similar rate per TW/h produced. Even more so if the coal mines get closed down, as those mines also tend to release a lot of radioactive waste into the environment.
Nuclear plants can in some way be seen as fossil fuel plants that store all the waste produced and only release anything if there is an accident. The fossil fueled plants do the opposite, constantly releasing a steady stream into the surrounding area with no risk of an single accident that release a large stored amount in a single instant.
Nuclear is "bad" and scary... Plus you know nuclear weapons. And solar and wind produce plenty... Apart form times when they do not, like many times during winter.
Everything I’ve read on the subject (admittedly not much) tells me that wind power is not only a disaster ecologically (kills too many birds, though not as many as domestic cats) but also unable to produce enough power to govern everything even with interconnects.
Distribution of power is also difficult, but there was notably a “still” winter in Sweden which is driving up prices significantly due to hydro not being enough. (I live here, that’s how I know)
I don't really understand the strong position you take while at the same time admitting to not having read much on the subject, and then to regurgitate a bunch of debunked nonsense.
“Everything I have read contradicts what you just stated.”
Not sure how I could be clearer. Maybe I made a mistake by admitting my ignorance, but i would rather admit my ignorance than assume I know everything because I read 5 articles and watched a few YouTube videos.
For starters HVDC lines are being installed in many places and many are already operational, and the 'windmills kill too many birds' thing was a push by the fossil fuel industry and has been debunked.
I don't know which five articles you have read but I suggest you read a couple more and more recent ones.
As for 'citation please': that does presume that you have done your own homework, I really don't see why I should do it for you but as to those first two points of yours:
Windmills do kill birds. That isn't seriously disputed. Some large wind farms have had a significant impact on threatened bird species. We might consider that an acceptable cost but the issue hasn't been debunked.
Yes, they do kill birds. But you know what? Buildings kill a very large multiple of that and housecats a very large multiple of the buildings. So no, they're not meatgrinders. Yes, some threatened bird species were impacted disproportionally, but any change would impact them because there are so few of them left, which is usually because of other causes: Windmills tend to be situated rather closer to the habitats of large birds of prey than housecats and buildings because we left them very little habitat to begin with, and neither large birds of prey nor windmills work well in an urban setting. But taking good care of this when siting windparks can alleviate a lot of that particular concern.
There was a whole campaign around this, including endlessly recycled gruesome material of the same 25 birds that at one time flew into a particular mill. Obviously that stuff has legs because hey, gore and something I don't want in my backyard.
I always wonder what drives people to push these issues for more than they are worth.
Let's approximate the cost of that.
The energy consumption of my country (the Netherlands) was 3157 PJ in 2017.
This was 980 kwh per person per week.
Solar batteries cost a bit more than $1000 per kwh.
So at these prices this plan costs approximately $1 million per person.
Solar batteries last 5-15 years.
If we say that they last 20 years, then the energy storage costs are $130 per person per day per week's worth of storage.
This plan sounds feasible if costs come down by factor of 10.
How does it compare to the cost of a nuclear power plant?
Storing a weeks worth of consumption on a 'per person' basis can be done for a fraction of $1m. But energy scarcity will lead to an increase in prices, which in turn will lead to a reduction in consumption. One big problem with energy is that it is still way too cheap.
Another problem is that there are a lot of subsidies involved for large consumers as well as extra taxation on small consumers.
Generating that amount of energy using nuclear would cost approximately $13.4 per person per day (IIRC ~3x what we're currently paying for it).
Note that I have not included the cost to generate the energy in the $130 storage costs, but that cost is negligible compared to the $130 anyway.
The environmental damage would probably also be much less with nuclear, versus a ton of solar + wind + batteries. But there would be disaster danger. It is unclear to me how the danger of nuclear disaster would compare to the danger of running out of stored energy in a winter month.
> Storing a weeks worth of consumption on a 'per person' basis can be done for a fraction of $1m.
How?
Since the costs of storage are currently so huge, it seems to me that if you want to go the solar + wind route, it makes sense to overprovision energy generation. That would reduce the amount of storage you need, and the extra energy during summer would be somewhat useful.
Note however that you would need massive amounts of wind+solar.
For an average household to satisfy its electricity needs, it needs ~10 average size solar panels (assuming perfect storage).
However, household electricity use is only 5% of our energy use.
So to satisfy energy needs with solar, you need approximately 200 solar panels per household. Even if you round that down to 50 due to reduction in energy consumption and use of wind energy, it's still a lot. But the Netherlands is obviously not a very good country for solar. In countries like Australia, the numbers would look way better.
Energy is too expensive, not too cheap. The real problem is that the market is distorted by subsidizing some forms of energy production and failing to price in the negative externalities of others.
The problem with your reasoning is that no cost-optimal plan of providing the society with energy would call for a week's worth of batteries. Furthermore, another problem is that judging from the number, you're presumably calculating with annual primary energy spent per capita, which will not be the same number after electrification (electrification is expected to massively slash primary energy expended -- for example in cars, where ~20 kWh of electricity replace ~6 liters of gasoline, primary energy shrinks roughly by a factor of three). Therefore translating current primary energy consumption into electricity that will need to be stored in an electrified future is nonsensical.
A factor of three (which is very optimistic) doesn't change the conclusion: a week's worth of storage is not feasible with current battery technology, let alone a few weeks.
How much storage would actually be required is not clear to me. It depends on a lot of factors. A week doesn't sound totally crazy to me; we certainly want a good safety margin so that society doesn't collapse in a bad winter. If we take super optimistic numbers and have one day of storage and take your factor of 3 reduction in energy use, then the cost of storage alone would still be about twice what we currently pay for the energy. Expensive but certainly a cost that would be possible to pay.
For cars, the factor of three is not "optimistic", it's simple comparison of the respective primary energies consumed by typical vehicles in their respective categories. 20 kWh to drive 100 km = 72 MJ of primary energy. 6 liters of gasoline to drive the same distance = ~220 MJ of primary energy -- roughly triple of the former number.
> A week doesn't sound totally crazy to me; we certainly want a good safety margin so that society doesn't collapse in a bad winter.
Yes, but that doesn't imply you need the capacity to run the country 100% on batteries for a week. That's just not something anyone would ever do. For example, a gas turbine with a low duty cycle would definitely be cheaper than a battery after a certain period of time. So why would you use a battery for that?
The specific factor for cars is not relevant. The factor of 3 is wildly optimistic for general energy use. The point is that even taking the factor of 3, it's still extremely expensive.
Regarding the second paragraph: if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree.
It was an example, since obviously different uses of energy will have different improvement factors - but major uses of energy have considerable improvement factors. In case of heating, for example, the factor is theoretically infinite because it's possible to build net-zero-energy buildings. And specifically in case of Germany, a very large portion of natural gas consumption goes into heating, so this is quite relevant here.
> if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...
I didn't say a word about basing something on fossil fuels.
> that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree
I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to was proposing storing a WEEK's worth of PRIMARY energy in TODAY'S amounts in BATTERIES. Nobody would seriously consider such a contrived scenario; it would be completely pointless. So I can't possibly agree with those numbers.
I find it fascinating that you call me nonsensical for making the very reasonable assumption that energy consumption will stay the same for a back-of-the envelope calculation, and here you are talking about infinite improvement factors.
> I didn't say a word about basing something on fossil fuels.
You said: "Yes, but that doesn't imply you need the capacity to run the country 100% on batteries for a week. That's just not something anyone would ever do. For example, a gas turbine with a low duty cycle would definitely be cheaper than a battery after a certain period of time. So why would you use a battery for that?"
> I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to
Note that I responded to that comment with a calculation showing that that plan is economically infeasible. The scenario is not all all contrived; what that person proposed we need is reasonable, and it would in fact be quite dangerous and insufficient to have only one week's worth. Years in which there is more than a week without wind and hardly any sun (due to winter) occur approximately every 10 years in Germany. Thus calling a week's worth of storage contrived is just wrong. If anything, it's contrived in the direction of not being enough.
Where did you get 1,000$/KWH of storage? Even at small scales (household-sized batteries, ~10~15KWH) prices are currently around 300$/KWH for lithium batteries including shipping in a 3rd world country (I know, because I live in a country where there's no 24/7 grid power and I moved my house to solar+batteries 2 years ago).
I'm pretty sure at the kinds of scale you'd need for a country price per KWH would be significantly less.
Solely political for federal elections following the Fukushima incident.
It’s sad, and almost infuriating, how an event that would never threaten safe nuclear plant operation in Germany set the stone rolling for “Energiewende”.
Personally i think Germany is making a huge mistake and will regret this course down the road.
Germany finalized the plans for a nuclear shutdown somewhere around 2021 in a binding law in 2002 (apparently this was based on "remaining energy to be generated", which doesn't naturally allow to put a precise date on it because of annual variations of demand, but all estimates I've seen in the past basically amount to "by very early 2020s"). This was 9 years before the Fukushima disaster. So please explain to me how this was "solely political for federal elections following the Fukushima incident". They would have needed a working crystal ball for that.
This actually dates back to 1998 when Schröder was chancellor and made the “Atomausstieg” a key topic for federal elections back then - agreed upon by the government and energy corps in 2000.
Momentum really was gained after fukushima.
Again, my personal opinion, this is a reactionary and short sighted approach answering emotional sentiments not scientific data and facts.
As far as I can tell, it became a law in 2002. I'm not sure how "momentum really was gained after Fukushima" when the phase-out procedures had to be followed ever since 2002. The whole thing has been in motion for almost twenty years.
My point is: it is a (really) dumb idea for a country that is facing serious infrastructural issues.
The days of great “german engineering” are mostly (i said “mostly”, ok?) a thing of the past - reality has it that this country lost focus and misses out on vital long-term investements and vision. And unfortunately most of this is driven on a political scale intertwined with classic german big corporations.
The “Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport” has been a joke from the beginning and is a showcase of how incompetent politicians can ruin a country.
Try making a call longer than 20 minutes while driving without it being dropped, charge your car…
Sorry for the rant, but it’s just sad where this is going.
I know. The point is that in the long run, the phaseout happened almost exactly as planned twenty years ago. This is no new development, of even a post-Fukushima-development.
Since Schröder seems to be instrumental in the construction of Nord Stream pipelines, it seems there exist a pretty decent economical incentive to change the energy policy towards the use of more natural gas, using the Fukushima incident to hasten the progress. The less nuclear that exist in the grid the higher the peak price will be during periods of low wind conditions.
Are there other politicians that are invested into natural gas?
1. Fear (nuclear waste, radioactivity, incidents, association with nuclear weapons)
2. The Green party has been born out of the anti-nuclear movement. Without them, Germany would probably use nuclear energy for most of its electricity needs, like France does. If the Green party would embrace nuclear, they would have to admit that the anti-nuclear movement was a huge mistake and it is actually, for a good part, to blame for climate change.
Just imagine what the world would look like today if the development of nuclear power plants hadn't been stopped in the 80s and countries used nuclear instead of coal and natural gas.
Sad that this is downvoted. The hidden cost of nuclear is one of the biggest issue the tech-affine crowds tend to ignore and not want to hear about. You may not pay it on your utility bill, but society and later generations will pay it.
As a leading politician of the German social democratic party famously said: a kwh you don't use is least expensive. I guess they'll save plenty of money when there's power rationing.
Countries that need a lot of reserve energy is paying a lot of subsidies to fossil fuels. Year in, year out. First you need to pay them in order to keep the plants on standby when renewables are plenty, and then you need to pay them again when demand exceeds the productions of renewables. The outcome is very large and steady stream of money going into the pockets of those who invest into fossil fuel.
Nuclear would need a lot in order to catch up to the same level of subsidies.
Your document's graph shows that France, and a bunch of other countries with nuclear, are subsidizing fossil fuels more than Germany.
That seems to be proving the oppposite of your point.
It's also interesting that France has generic "electricity" subsidies that are bigger than their "nuclear" subsidies and yet 70% of their electricity is nuclear.
The generic "electricity" subsidies in France seems similar to other countries, so my read is that they are things like transmission lines and other costs that is independent of the technology that generated the power.
Could you explain the logic behind that idea that France subsidizes to fossil fuel is proof that nuclear is expensive? To me it is proof that the fossil fuel industry will extract its cut as long as the grid is dependent on it.
Also, a technical details. In actually billions, France is not subsidizing fossil fuels more than Germany. France total subsidize is about half of Germany, so the actually money that goes to fossil fuels are quite much smaller as a result.
Someone said nuclear is expensive (compared with renewables) which is factually correct.
You said that this was wrong, because countries that deployed renewables needed to pay fossil fuels to standby and then pay them again when there's no wind or sun.
To back this up you pointed to a document about level of subsidies.
That document shows that Germany gives less subsidies to fossil fuels than other countries with nuclear plants, notably France, as a percent of GDP.
You now appear to be trying to wiggle out of this on a technicality because Germany has a bigger economy than France, though even then the final numbers are 12.2 billion vs 11.5 billion.
But, let's pretend that's what you were saying, oh look, countries with nuclear on average subsidize fossil fuels more in absolute terms.
(This is because they are bigger economies, so this is an entirely spurious correlation but even playing by your changed rules, your document doesn't support your argument).
Which is a good thing. Just converting energy sources is not going to save us. We need to tackle the energy sinks too, i.e., getting smarter about how we use the available energy, i.e., mostly being more energy efficient. ("We" as in "humankind".) Raising prices is the right incentive here. In the long run, +50% is not actually that bad. There is room for a lot more.
Funny, I had this exact discussion with a colleague at work the other day. She claimed this is nonsense and won't change anybody's mind.
Then she mentioned that she just had bought a new car. I asked what kind, it's a hybrid. I asked why? Well, because her old car was using so much fuel, and with recent price hikes, that became too expensive, so she just bought one that was significantly more fuel efficient.
The _exact_ same person! Just 2 minutes after claiming monetary incentives don't work demonstrated that it actually worked for her!
I have high hopes that price hikes are what convinces people to change their behavior. Not ads, not appealing to ethics or conciousness or "the future of your kids" or pictures of dying polar bears. You need to feel it in your wallet, then you act, plain and simple.
> You need to feel it in your wallet, then you act, plain and simple.
In that case, we should make the price of power relative to your wealth, shouldn't we? I'm guessing you're an academic and work in tech or consulting, so you make two, three times the national average if you live in Germany. Trippling the price of power will barely register on your level, so you have little incentive to conserve energy. However, if we said that e.g. a kwh costs 1/15000 of your personal wealth, you'd have a lot of incentive, because even if you start the year as a billionaire, you'd be broke if you used 15000kwh.
I have a feeling that none of the -typically well-off- proponents of "we must make the people pay more so that they stop consuming" will be a fan of that.
Hybrids are not the same as electric. They get their fuel savings from the fact that they can convert kinetic energy from braking back to electricity. Plus the fact that electric engines are more efficient way to pull off (which is where the ICE wastes most fuel). None of those things require an external electricity source.
Maybe we should take step further. Make energy cost non-linear. Make it cost exponentially more with increased use. So if you do not use lot you pay base rate per unit. If you use lot you pay price multiple to the base rate per unit.
Looks like pandering to Greens/anti-nuclear people, but honestly, I don't know. To me, it appears borderline insane, but there's probably something that I am missing.
Coal was the primary source for energy in Germany since the beginning of the industrial age. In the last decade we had some years were alternatives took over but since the emergence of nuclear power it was never the primary source for energy.
By "primary" you mean they used 27% over a 6 month period, compared with 21% the 6 months a year earlier. Switching back into first after a good spell for wind had it briefly in the lead.
Why does that mean they can't switch it off?
The UK had 30% Coal in 2014 when they announced they would phase it out and did so slightly ahead of schedule.
27% is a misleading number because it is the average for the whole period. On some days, wind and solar can provide 100% of all electricity. But on windstill nights, it is closer to 0%. Without having a way to store a whole nation's energy needs for several days or even weeks, you still need fossil fuels (or nuclear).
> Without having a way to store a whole nation's energy needs for several days or even weeks
That requirement makes no sense, though. Do you foresee a massive volcanic eruption that there will be darkness for several weeks? Because it's sort of fact of life that the sun always rises tomorrow. Therefore asking for 100% of storage for weeks never made any sense.
Don't freak out about a statistical variation. The trend is for wind power to increase and for coal power to decrease in Germany, so really the only interesting points in time are the first time when wind generated more than coal and the last time when coal generated more than wind. The first just happened in 2020, so freaking out about coal momentarily being on top in 2021 is pointless.
I think a big part of the problem is that Germany has strong business ties with Russia (if you think I'm exaggerating, you might not realize that former chancellor Gerhard Schröder became the chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG and of Rosneft right after being chancellor — ties do not get any stronger than that).
It is in Russia's best interest to have EU countries dependent on their fossil fuels (natural gas and coal). This goal is being achieved admirably, with Poland burning coal like crazy (buying lots of Russian coal) and Germany burning Russian gas like crazy (through Nord Stream pipelines).
Shutting down the nuclear plants plays straight into that strategy.
Everyone is talking about not doing enough. Everyday, even here. There is this strange fascination like in the 70s with fossil fuels that we can just worry later about it. It's the same with nuclear energy now, maybe even worse. Using one finite polluting resource is not gonna be the answer as much as everyone on hackernews wants it to be. Sometimes when you want progress you have to burn the boats. This is Germany burning the boats so they have to force alternatives and progress.
There is trade, and then there is giving a geopolitical rival an "off" switch to a sizable percentage of your energy supply.
Free trade requires easy substitutes to remain "free" and opponents of this plan mostly think that energy markets don't work like that because of high switching costs. Germany can not just spin up new nuclear plants or easily buy electricity from neighbors past a certain amount of it's usage. I don't know enough to know if this angle is correct.
The threat isn't directly to invade Germany. It is to stop Germany from intervening when Russia invade it's neighbor countries. EG if you embargo us or provide Military Support to russian opponents, will shut down the power in Germany and you'll freeze to death. A short-term gas disruption will cause Russia to lose some money, but would be much more dangerous for Germany
Russian gas makes up only 1/3rd of Germany's total amount of imported gas and only because it's cheap. If the Russians really were to turn off the valve, the amount could be made up for with other sources. By far not instantly, but nobody would freeze to death, either.
Germany's alleged dependence on Russian gas is mostly a fairytale of US propaganda.
I'm open to the idea that this is overstated, but would love to see the numbers. Is it 1/3rd now or 10 years from now? Does the alternative supply and import infrastructure have the capacity to provide 30% more on short notice? Alternatively, how long and how well can Germany operate with only 60% imports.
It's been around the 35% mark for at least a decade. We also import from Norway (~30%) and the Netherlands (~20%), along with about 6-8% from domestic sources and some imports from the United Kingdom.
The middle east is another potential supplier and Italy, for example, get their gas from Africa. Germany also has the biggest gas storage capacity in Europe and the gas tanks are usually filled quite well before winter (>95%). Not this year though, because the MBAs took a gamble on Nord Stream 2 going operational and lost the wager, resulting in soaring gas prices all across Europe.
You also need to keep in mind that natural gas is not solely used for heating homes, but also industrial processes and generating electricity, among others, which could be reduced or stopped if it really came down to it.
In short: Russia turning off the valves would be more of an inconvenience than the life-threatening situation it is often claimed to be. But personally I don't see that happening, as the Russians have been a very reliable supplier for decades.
Green points... Gas is not green, thus better not to progress it until absolutely mandatory. On other hand eco-terrorist are also against nuclear so better to get rid of that as well. And electricity comes from wall...
It is amazing. But two major incidents within 30 years time range are not so amazing. When we continue in that rate we will have a serious problem. And with aging reactors and instability everywhere it does not look good.
One incident caused by a natural disaster that would never happen in a European country like Germany, the other caused by mismanagement and frankly jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence which would also never happen in a country like Germany.
Edit: in response to the large number of people bringing up BER and other infrastructure failures in Germany: yes, BER and others may have been bad, but a completely different kind (and magnitude) of incompetence than that which led to the Chernobyl meltdown. They really aren’t comparable.
Well nothing is risk-free. But in my opinion in any case the risk of allowing climate change to rampantly continue vastly outweighs the infinitesimal risks of nuclear.
"infinitesimal risk" would be something that is unlikely to happen once in a million years or even the lifetime of the planet which is clearly not the case. It's "acceptable risk" or "justifiable risk" at best.
This summer a large part of germany was completely flooded. This was a natural disaster, which might happen at higher frequencies nowadays. The alarming systems in place competely failed and around 200 people drowned in Germany. There are so many things which could happen and countries like Germany are not prepared for.
This is ridiculous! The house owners were convinced that there couldn't take place a flooding in that area! Most of them had no insuranced for flooding either. No specialist of any kind has predicted such a scenario...
> This was a natural disaster, which might happen at higher frequencies nowadays.
You don't build nuclear power plants in narrow valleys with known flood events though. I mean, you also don't build wind turbines in swamps and hope they don't fall over, or put solar panels on your roof and don't fasten them.
Accidents will always happen, even in Germany [1]. And don’t forget their WW2 bomb detection isn’t perfect [2]. Nor are they free from corruptive practices [3].
Floodings are going to be much more frequent than they were in the past. If you want to take a look at where those nuclear reactors are located and explain how they were to be operated safely and cost effectively in the next decade or two I think the Germans would be all ear.
Germany has this right: do it now, and deal with it, rather than to continue to kick the can down the road for later generations to solve the problems, a kind of temporeal externalization.
Jaw droppingly pigheaded incompetence is unfortunately quite common once economic pressure makes the correct way of running things untenable.
Everybody starts cutting small corners everywhere, assuming it doesn't matter much as all the other people are still doing their job. One day, a corner too many gets cut, and the slack in the system is too small to catch what should be a minor problem.
Don't trust the public facade and official reports, they have been filtered by PR departments and by people not wishing to report bad news to their managers and peers
>BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".
Mortality from existing fossil fuels is significantly worse (just from production and ignoring all the pollutants in the air and even ignoring that coal plants regularly emit more radiation into the air than have ever died from nuclear power generation). In fact, mortality from nuclear power generation is closer to solar and wind.
Yes the incidents are scary and news grabbing but that’s it. The actual data is that it’s safe (look at mortality as a function of megawatt hours produced). Not to mention that in the 60-80 years since those plants were designed (Fukushima and Chernobyl are basically the same design if I recall correctly), we’ve gotten much better at designing plants that withstand natural disasters. This is also ignoring the fact that we can do a better job of locating power plants further away from disaster-prone areas due to advances in power distributions systems (eg HVDC).
The problem with nuclear is that there’s a lot of fear still lingering around it from Cold War era propaganda. Any issues just play into and reinforce those fears. The real problem is that education is the only effective tool we know of to fight fear but it’s slow and not up to the challenge that nuclear fission faces. That’s because on top of the fears are actual opponents who will fight any real evidence-based education efforts by playing up the FUD (very old tactic). Fossil fuel companies don’t want it because nuclear presents an existential threat to their existence. US national security interests are worried about proliferation if we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. It also presents a serious threat to US hegemony if countries are able to establish their own energy independence.
> Mortality from existing fossil fuels is significantly worse
That may very well be true but it's completely irrelevant for future choices. Not building more nuclear plants doesn't mean you'll be building more fossil fuel plants instead.
EDIT: For all the downvoters, see the fourth chart (Gross power production in Germany 1990-2021, by source (non-stacked)) on https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... and explain to me how they're building more fossil fuel power plants over the years while building zero nuclear power plants.
So far, probably what Zerrahn et al. suggested in 2018 (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429211...), namely overbuild renewable generation to achieve a Pareto-optimal mix of generation of storage. This doesn't prevent opportunistic uses such as demand-controlled charging of electric vehicles or demand-controlled hydrogen generation from the overgeneration which further increases the appeal of this option.
I don't care about California. I was talking about Germany. This whole thread is about an article on Germany. There is no such trend in Germany, as data shows.
Unfortunately if we look at Germany, it means exactly that, as the electricity deficit from closing down these plants is largely offset by coal plants.
Completely wrong, as German statistics for power generation by source show. As nuclear power plants generate less and less electricity, so does German coal (with some inter-annual noise, of course, but the German trend is clear).
> An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.
What matters is whether increased reliance on renewables slows down the decarbonisation effort. If you have data which shows that, I'd be interested to see it.
In return, let me offer a study from last year which found: "in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy. And in countries with a low GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production clearly associates with CO2 emissions that tend to be higher."
Solar and wind mean you need batteries (can’t do off-peak without it). This means you still need peaker plants. Even if you accelerated battery technology drastically (which I’d say is already at max R&D speed mostly), you’re looking at some fundamental challenges getting the precious materials (total volume/cost and also energy required to do the mining). Finally, my understanding is that solar and wind can’t actually be used in some energy-intensive industrial processes because they can’t generate enough heat. This means those power needs are still powered by traditional fossil fuel power plants (and too expensive to use just for the industrial purpose so it’s actually part of the energy mix for good).
Solar and wind are important parts of the energy mix and.OF COURSE we need them. Nuclear is where the bulk of the focus needs to go though to actually decarbonize because it can handle literally every use case that fossil fuels do but cheaper, safer and less polluting.
> Solar and wind mean you need batteries (can’t do off-peak without it)
We do not have enough batteries in the world, and producing enough of them would take decades, and cost us trillions of dollars. Nuclear power plants are better and cheaper solution.
I just added a source that shows that data tells something completely different. In the past ten years, German renewable generation more than doubled (from annual ~100 TWh to ~250 TWh) while their natural gas consumption for electricity generation today is basically the same as back then (somewhere around 90 TWh annually from gas back then as well as today). Not sure how natural gas stagnation can be described as "large increased reliance".
Because your sources show energy production in Germany.
The Germans import a significant amount (~64%) of their energy from other countries, including France (nuclear) and Poland (coal), but also countries further afield like Norway and Russia.
Germans don't import 64% of electricity (in fact they're a net exporter almost every year). This article is about electricity generation in Germany and I'm commenting on electricity generation in Germany. The comment I was responding to was also about electricity generation in Germany. Not quite sure where you're trying to steer the discussion. To the fact that Germany, like many other countries, has yet to fully electrify transportation and heating, where most of these energy imports (gas and oil) are going? Sure, but almost everyone has to. Many, if not most, other developed countries don't fare much better so far.
> Almost 60 percent of the EU’s energy needs (excluding the UK) were met by net imports in 2018. Germany’s energy import dependency was still higher at 63.6 percent – a slight decrease compared to the previous year’s 64 percent.
You're confusing energy with electricity again. Please don't do that. Furthermore, it's also a number that is completely irrelevant for the climate perspective, since it doesn't matter if your imports are low if that means you're drilling massive amounts of gas yourself like the US or the UK -- the planet doesn't care if the fuel crossed the borders or not. And, as your own article notes, German decarbonization plans include the elimination of these imports anyway.
This is so wrong. If you look at the death rate from those incidents and compare them to the death rates of literally any other source of energy (including other renewables), they are much much lower.
Nuclear is proven to be our most safe, clean and renewable source of energy.
Maybe convince somebody then to have final storage for nuclear waste anywhere close to where they live. Once this crap is in your backyard, the armchair philosophers find excuses really fast.
Similar with wind turbines, but at least those are so small scale that you can convince closeby towns fast by just letting them participate in the profits. Different story for leaking barrels stored underground.
(And yes, that's how this crap ends up. Just google Asse II and then let's discuss German cleanliness again.)
We have never had a significant disaster of any gen >=3 reactor. TMI, Fukushima, Chernobyl were all gen 2, and gen 1 is all prototypes.
Anything built after 1972 has not had anywhere near this level of incidents.
Also Chernobyl had severe safety flaws due to its origin as an early model breeder reactor (and my head canon is that the test that caused the disaster was in some way related to surreptitious fuel changing to run breeding experiments. The RBMK reactors were designed for rapid fuel shuffling.... In other words, safety was compromised to keep the door open to the possibility of sneaky weapons grade material production).
Also also, Chernobyl had some other bone-headed flaws, such as a positive void coefficient and positive scram coefficient (read: trying to rapid shutdown during an emergency made the reaction increase). Humanity has learned a ton since then.
80%+ of nuclear power comes from gen 2 reactors. There are still 8 RBMK reactors in operation, all capable of failing the same way Chernobyl failed, with the same widespread contamination.
IF new generation reactors can prove to be safe and not create waste and decommissioning problems, and if they can be built economically, then they are worthy of consideration.
But power is fungible. If the cheapest next watt-hour is solar or wind, then why spend on anything else?
I doubt that politics is the reason why extremely small installations like that are uneconomical. The capex per kWh would be higher and the same for the opex, maybe you can properly reduce the capex if you produce tons of them but how will you fix the opex? You'll need too many people per kWh to operate the plant and for security.
10MW is insanely costly, regardless. That's so small that it isn't enough to justify even the overhead of running a plant. 1GW or so is the smallest size where it starts to make sense to design a nuclear plant that has a hope of delivering electricity at a price that matches the market (and even then: usually only by subtracting decommissioning and construction costs from the equation).
for the plants that are being decomissioned, those costs had already been paid off! that's the whole point; the ongoing costs for these plants were low, so it is the height of derangement to shut them down at the very moment germany needs reliable low-carbon locally-sourced energy. decomissioning them is monumentally expensive and amounts to civilization-scale vandalism.
It's dirt cheap because it's heavily subsidized by the public. For example no commercial entity in the world insures a nuclear power plant. These costs are completely hidden.
It's not politics. It is a practical reality that it is dangerous. As dangerous as coal plants. But for some reason HN likes to turn a blind eye to un-disposable toxic waste and the potential for citywide devastation (Chernobyl).
Devastation is a strong word. The restricted area around Chernobyl is incredibly wild and lush right now. It's just humans that don't want to live there for credible health concerns.
> It's just humans that don't want to live there for credible health concerns.
A significant population of residents actually moved back there, despite the restrictions. I believe all of the former residents of Chernobyl (which is actually a tiny village) are now dead, the last old babushka passing in October/November 2016. I visited what was left of her house.
There are still plenty of people living in and around the exclusion zone for various reasons (mostly military).
Coal plants kill millions of people worldwide every year.
How many people died from Chernobyl? About 50, despite over 100,000 people working at the site on cleanup. The adjacent reactors continued to run and provide power for about a decade after the incident.
How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero.
> How many people died from Chernobyl? About 50, despite over 100,000 people working at the site on cleanup. The adjacent reactors continued to run and provide power for about a decade after the incident.
I am surprised you're quoting official Soviet numbers. Numbers that weren't updated since the early days of the accident.
> How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero.
Utility scale solar is built on the ground, no roof work required, very safe. The panels can be recycled almost entirely, similar to the utility scale battery storage that can back it. Tesla is scaling up utility storage manufacturing, Redwood Materials is scaling up recycling to close the loop and provide cheaper feedstock once there’s enough raw materials in the loop. Europe’s entire wind potential could power the world.
New nuclear is a pipe dream (~10-15 years from breaking ground to first kWh produced), but old nuclear generators should be ran as long as safely possible. Big fail on Germany’s part here, although natural gas price spikes will force their hand on more renewables, transmission (including cross border interconnectors), and battery storage.
I have seen some dubious statistics that downplay the number of deaths from nuclear accidents caused by cancer and play up the number of deaths caused by installing solar panels (e.g. by counting the number of people dying on roofs and assuming that most of them were up there installing panels).
Can you find 20 people who have died installing solar panels? I found about 7 examples on google globally (3 in the US).
The rest of the pages were the dubious statistics calculating "deaths per TWh" that both downplay cancer deaths from nuclear power and extrapolate tens of thousands of falling-off-rooftop-deaths if we generated as much electricity from our residential rooftops as we would from nuclear (which we wouldnt, rooftop solar will always be comparatively minor).
This says very little about solar it just says that clambering about on roofs kills people.
There were many much higher estimates made in 1986 when the disaster happened, but they turned out to be wrong. Apparently small amounts of radiation spread out over many people doesn't increase cancer rates. There were very noticeable increases in cancer near the disaster area, but most of those cancer patients survived.
> A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
It 100% is politics. For example in the US, our government is incapable of doing anything on a time scale of longer than 4-8 years because the party in power shifts and undoes everything the other party did during that time. Nuclear power is inherently authoritarian because it works best under unchanging centralized governments that can plan out a 30 year program without interference from other parties.
It's just ridiculously capital intensive. If the government throws money at it it happens.
Some of the costs of a nuclear weapons program can be shared. This is probably partly why France invested heavily in it and why countries keen on it coincidentall almos always have nuclear arsenals. It's unlikely it's because they're secretly authoritarian.
> The actual cost of generating electricity by nuclear power is not published by EDF or the French government but is estimated to be between €59/MWh and €83/MWh (~$67-95).
Apart from some localised hotspots, the actual worse case that is Chernobyl is doing amazingly from biosphere point of view. Not having humans around is actually great for biosphere.
Fukushima on other hand is insignificant. Not really having much effect on anything.
> Fukushima on other hand is insignificant. Not really having much effect on anything.
WTF?! Are you not aware of the constant amount of waste water being poured into the Pacific? [0] Or the absurdly high amount of Cesium being found in migrating Tuna? The amount of cancers and heart related issues is still unfolding to this day, particularly in the children from the surrounding areas.
And the people who were forced to evacuate and then forced out of the shelters with nothing to go back to would have a huge issue with what you have said.
I cant believe anyone not from TEPCO or the Nuclear Village would say such a blatantly stupid and calloused thing!
> Perhaps evacuating unnecessarily large areas was the problem in the first place.
Academic handwaving after the event has very little bearing on the amount of Human suffering that took place, the displacement and the impoverishment and degrading experiences (Fukushima victims lived in a FEMA camp like situation and were deemed untouchable in Japanese Society like the Hibakusha before them and incurred massive property losses in addition to the Human costs) furthermore it's hard to explain the severity to people who have never experienced a Nuclear incident themselves. The level of scaring you're left with, the PTSD that comes with it is something very few living Humans can relate or truly empathize with and I speak from experience.
You're never the same, you come close with the reality that this technology was not fully thought-out in the 20th century when it was created and built with near headlong fervor with no thought to the repercussions of it going wrong--and in most cases it's at a time your in a life-death situation.
Most plants are built in the coastal area and often only have one way in and one way out because of the cost and practical aspects of building freeways along the coast. You are essentially trapped in when everyone tries to evacuate on their own and you're left with the realization that the energy that was generated was mainly exported at a profit for a private company who will later find ways to absolve themselves of criminal negligence and declare bankruptcy before restitution is ever made to the areas where it was built--look at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Edison, and going back to Bectel in the 70s with SONGS.
And regulators like the NRC will simply acquiesce and allow for the waste material to lay in an actively seismic area that if unsettled could be just as catastrophic to the Ocean and local area as if the plant were still operational. They assumed NV would continue to take it, and were left with no other solution when they refused.
To be clear: I'm more optimistic about 21st Century approaches to Nuclear than I was to 20th, which I would say was a DOA thing for me after having lived through SONGS, due to the effects of climate change (the ongoing Boulder fire being the most recent proving how absurd this has gotten) but that doesn't detract from the fact that Nuclear needs to be far more monitored and regulated in terms of waste management and city planning before a single brick is laid down.
With that said, I'm glad Diablo Canyon was shut down, if fusion is just around the corner than hopefully that will be what takes SONGS and DC place when its ready, but until then solar, wind and other forms of renewable are more suitable alternatives to fossil fuel plants.
Furthermore, it's biggest proponents should be forced to live to next one for the lifetime of the plant. I can't see how that be enforced but the way some of you speak with such hubris like it's the most easiest and practical thing to do speaks volumes of just how ignorant and detached you really are from reality of the drawbacks of nuclear plants and the immense complexity that comes with them.
> Or the absurdly high amount of Cesium being found in migrating Tuna?
10 times higher levels than normal of a single radioactive element is still not dangerous, especially since this is temporary. The main dangers with eating tuna still comes from their high mercury content, which is mainly due to coal power plants.
> The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
Small plants, especially something on the order of 10MW, which is about 1% of a normal sized one would be extremely uneconomical. You need all of the security and process of a much larger plant for a piddly little bit of electricity. You're talking about the equivalent of a couple of windmills, that require a small fraction of the land, and will happily run unattended.
more money to be made by politicians taking bribes from China who produces 90% of the worlds solar panels and windmills. I'm sure sending billions to China won't have any long term negative effects, definitely nothing negative about being dependent on a foreign country to create your energy supply
Windmills installed all over Germany are mostly German and some Danish and Swedish production. Afaik there are no gridscale windmill exports from China, though there are small ones (up to about 40KW). If you do have a pointer to a gridscale Chinese machine that has been installed in Europe I'd love to hear about it, especially if it has been operating for a while and maintenance records can be reviewed for comparison purposes.
Yeah, I'm a supporter of Nordstream 2 because cheap gas is better than expensive gas, but I can't understand why Germany is making itself more dependent on gas instead of building out nuclear capacity to be less dependent.
The whole policy really doesn't make a lot of sense, it's not pro-fossil fuel or anti-fossil fuel, it's not pro-Russia or anti-Russia. It's all of the above, which is worse, since it's anti-everything and pro-everything. It suggests German leadership is too incompetent to pursue their own interests and so they are effectively acting randomly.
It is hard to find an explanation for this other than Germany has been co-opted by Russia. Ukraine has been separated from the herd and will surely fall. Putin will be on Germany's border by the end of the decade.
I have skimmed these kinds of articles, and maybe I am missing another important reason for this happening, but I am not seeing it. Is it essentially: people are scared of nuclear?
Nuclear is pretty unpopular in Germany, especially since Fukushima. In 2012 73% of Germans were in favor of the phase-out compared to 16% opposed. I don't think it's fair to characterize that as people being scared though. Some certainly may be, but others have different reasons.
I think it's unfortunate given the climate, energy and geopolitical situation, but the Government is doing what the people clearly want it to do.
I'm sad that the UK has left the EU. Out of Germany, France and the UK, they always seemed like the voice of reason and the least bureaucratic. I can't exactly pinpoint why I think that but here are some examples - (1) they don't make ridiculous policy decisions such as shutting down nuclear power plants (ok, leaving the EU is an exception to this) (2) best at e-government (3) seems like a good environment for startups, for example almost all European fusion startups are from the UK (4) their politicians don't end up working for Russian energy companies.
I initially opposed the move but now it sort of makes sense. Previously I was influencing my own thoughts from the liberal media sphere but the more you dig into the reasons why UK left the EU, the more convinced I am. Just look at the vaccine fuck ups by the EU. UK has one of the best vaccination strategies in the world barring smaller nations like Israel, UAE and Qatar. And of course, China.
> UK has one of the best vaccination strategies in the world
Yet one of the worst outcomes fighting the virus. "UK had one of Europe’s highest excess death rates in under 65s" in 2020.[a] In practice, what did the EU really get wrong with the vaccines, other than generating some unjustifiably smug headlines from the UK right-wing press? The UK can't even say it got a good deal on the vaccines, having paid 50% more per dose than than EU.[b]
I don't know where to even begin. I'll just leave you with this about the EU's vaccination fuck up. They were hamstrung with negotation of prices where the rest of the world including US moved on. There were several discussions on HN about this: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2021/03/31/why-the-eus-co...
> Yet one of the worst outcomes fighting the virus. "UK had one of Europe’s highest excess death rates in under 65s" in 2020
Very disingenious to quote pre-vaccination death rates and studies from 2020. I am specifically talking about post-vaccination phase of UK. They have 70% vaccination rate, much higher than EU which is at abysmal 54% (Data from Nov 2021). https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/only-54percent-of-europe-is-...
Quoting misleading data and then immediately jumping on to bashing right-wing UK media isn't helping your arugments.
Sorry if you think my figures are out of date. I'm happy to consider the current totals instead. According to Worldometer[0], for example, the UK is slightly worse in terms of "Deaths / 1M pop" than Greece and Spain, which is the median EU country for that statistic.
So it's not at all clear that the UK would have been in a worse position if it had been able to take advantage of the EU's lower vaccine price, and in any case, being an EU member wouldn't have prevented the UK from securing its own vaccine supply, as Hungary did.
Despite a lot of investigation it looks like Fukushima did not cause an increase in cancer deaths (and there were no direct deaths from it either).
It's sad and strange that we treat it as if it had caused hundreds or thousands of deaths, and our response to it is to increase fossil fuel use, which definitely will lead to more death and pollution.
Maybe saddest part of the whole Fukushima was that it was entirely avoidable. If proper planning and implementation was actually done. I expect Germany and European nations being culturally better to get things fixed.
My understanding was that root-cause was old design and not sufficiently secure back-up power and failure to get such on site. Which could have been done, but was not.
That fact that people look at Fukushima and say, "see this is why nuclear power is safe!" absolutely blows my mind.
The outcome we had for Fukushima was not the only one possible. It could have been better, much better, and it could have been worse, much worse. That fact that one of the most advanced and earthquake prepared nations in the world even got close to having a Fukushima event, let alone actually had one, should paint a clear picture of pitfalls of nuclear power.
We need power the scales for the world. The most urgent need for clean power is in developing countries, which are actually not the countries who would have the best chance to run a safe nuclear power plant.
Solar is already scaling, it's already safe, it's already cost effective. Utility-scale storage is already more than on the way and is dropping in price quickly, and it's not even a problem with solar until solar penetrates a larger percentage of the grid anyways. Do I think that nuclear plants in modern countries should be shutting down: No. But the real justification to supporting nuclear over solar for the future of our power grid is to be a contrarian or because you think nuclear power is cool.
The point isn't that Fukushima is great and hooray, the point is that it still killed fewer people than coal power plants do every year in pretty much every country.
And solar won't be replacing the nuclear plants that are being shut down. Coal and gas will.
> And solar won't be replacing the nuclear plants that are being shut down. Coal and gas will.
I already stated that I don't support the shutting down of existing nuclear plants. But it hardly matters, the plants shutting down a very small part of the global grid, what matters is the future of the grid. Solar and wind with storage should be the future of the grid.
Freezing to death is free... And great for climate.
Intercontinental connections are possible, but what options we have Africa, Russia and Middle-East? Not exactly stable options. So local production is only real solution and nuclear is very reasonable option from carbon standpoint.
This seems shortsighted at first look, but there's got to be more to it. During an undeniable, ongoing energy crisis every power source, a continuous one at that, should be treasured. While the phase out has been ongoing for more than a decade, could this not have been put into hold temporarily? Any expiring certifications? In any case I find it laughable that Greens themselves have contributed to the decommissioning of NPPs and are supporting of this move. So much for one the actual cleanest and certainly the one safest energy source.
this is the the result of a nonexistent European energy policy, let's switch of coal and nuclear and not work on accelerating the approving process of renewable power plants what should go wrong right? the entire EU is completely dependent on gas which we import from countries like Russia, Algeria. Currently due to the skyrocketing gas prices, production from coal is at a all time high, but hey the green transition is working right??! companies are closing because they can't handle the energy costs, but Germany says everything is fine...
Don't forget successful more then two decades long effort to torpedo the pipeline from Norway to Poland while forcing through Nordstream that goes around.
The EU have a consistent policy of leaving Putin an option to put pressure or just straight up capture some land to the East of German border by making sure the gas won't stop flowing in case that happens.
It's overall sad, Germany is at the top of the list of competent countries to run nuclear plants. Better news would be if they double on it and sell surplus to the rest of Europe.
The main reason behind this is to enforce decision of letting Russian gas in i.e. to have NS2 officially opened. With power shortages -- in the whole Europe -- that this shutdown will only make worse, blocking NS2 will no longer look as a viable option.
There may be an additional, geopolitical element to Germany buying France's nuclear energy. This is an implicit subsidy of the EU's only nuclear weapons state, post Brexit. To make sure the EU (not the same as NATO) continues to have a nuclear deterrent of its own, France must be recompensed.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] threadPutin would love a good excuse to close ground pipeline tho, this would brute force Nord Stream 2.
Anyways, I believe it was a pretty shitty idea to say no to nuclear.
IIRC, two are still alive.
Yes, people died at Chernobyl, and we all know why (incompetence and lies). Are you suggesting the German nuclear industry is comparable to the Soviets?
Not to say that I advocate for a blanket ban.
But I am concerned that a Chernobyl could happen in China, if the same human failure occurs again, in a command economy, with people afraid to speak up regarding safety issues vs targets.
The parts that will be uninhabitable for the distant future is really tiny, most of it is already safer than many other parts people live in where natural disasters happens regularly. Living near a coal plant is much worse for your health than living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Edit: If you don't believe me you can read about current radiation levels in Pripyat here:
http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation...
Below 1 micro Sievert per hour is normal and harmless to live in, most of Pripyat is already there but some areas like the reactor and the graveyard used during clean-up are much higher. But still the town was just a few square kilometres, anything outside of that is basically safe. Just that Ukraine doesn't need this area for anything, they have no reason to open it up.
Honestly, I think we should declare a 50% tax on the gas going through the new Putin Nordstream 2 pipeline and direct the proceeds to NATO. Prices in externalities of gas usage and gets the EU closer to their NATO commitment.
You're right, why waste money teaching the kid Aikido when we could instead spend that money on school tutors to try to get them into schools that don't have bullies.
Build renewables and nuclear instead of increasing dependency on gas from a geopolitical bully?
Obviously different problems are always best tackled in combination! Practically guarantees success. /s
And obviously geopolitical bullies should just not be talked to. Hm so let's see who is left to talk to then. Russia, China, U.S., NATO, none of those won't an option anymore. Good to keep your principles. And good luck doing anything good to the climate with the strategy of only talking to yourself (assuming your country isn't a geopolitical bully itself, which is likely quite a stretch, given the odds.)
A better solution would be to stop giving russia money for its gas. That means not shutting down nuclear plants, and instead building many many more power plants to make Europe energy independent
The single most important move to save the EU from Putin and to decarbonise is to fund green energy like wind, solar and particularly invest in energy storage solutions to smooth out unreliable sources. It's very difficult to compete with Gas turbines in terms of supply and responsiveness.
It's like the anti-vax crowd.
I specifically want a source to substantiate the claim you made with your first eight words.
It’s not a great line, what is needed is how much generation and how much storage is needed.
If.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-3274/germany-coal-tops-wind...
https://energypost.eu/germany-2021-coal-generation-is-rising...
And they're replacing it with... gas! Great, another carbon based fuel that is dramatically inferior to Nuclear in energy density, environment impact, and national security.
The new government tries to accelerate the construction of renewable energy but I think their plans will fail because of worker shortage and supply chain problems.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3780688-france-shuts-down-nucl...
Trading the risk of energy supply shortage for the risk of radioactive accidents.
Most of that engineering is done in-house as well. I wonder what explains this different attitude as compared to their neighbors.
Nuclear plants can in some way be seen as fossil fuel plants that store all the waste produced and only release anything if there is an accident. The fossil fueled plants do the opposite, constantly releasing a steady stream into the surrounding area with no risk of an single accident that release a large stored amount in a single instant.
Some storage would be nice to have, preferably more than a weeks' worth.
Do you have any citations for such a theory?
Everything I’ve read on the subject (admittedly not much) tells me that wind power is not only a disaster ecologically (kills too many birds, though not as many as domestic cats) but also unable to produce enough power to govern everything even with interconnects.
Distribution of power is also difficult, but there was notably a “still” winter in Sweden which is driving up prices significantly due to hydro not being enough. (I live here, that’s how I know)
This is not a good basis for a discussion.
“Everything I have read contradicts what you just stated.”
Not sure how I could be clearer. Maybe I made a mistake by admitting my ignorance, but i would rather admit my ignorance than assume I know everything because I read 5 articles and watched a few YouTube videos.
I don't know which five articles you have read but I suggest you read a couple more and more recent ones.
As for 'citation please': that does presume that you have done your own homework, I really don't see why I should do it for you but as to those first two points of yours:
https://theconversation.com/wind-farms-are-hardly-the-bird-s...
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HVDC_projects
Some of those links are well over 1000 km long.
> I really don't see why I should do it for you
Because the burden of proof rests with the person making the claim.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160929143808.h...
So yes, the 'windmills are bird killers' theory has been debunked to the extent that it was previously pushed as a false reason to not install windpower. (See for instance: https://windmillskill.com/blog/windfarms-kill-10-20-times-mo...)
There was a whole campaign around this, including endlessly recycled gruesome material of the same 25 birds that at one time flew into a particular mill. Obviously that stuff has legs because hey, gore and something I don't want in my backyard.
I always wonder what drives people to push these issues for more than they are worth.
Storing a weeks worth of consumption on a 'per person' basis can be done for a fraction of $1m. But energy scarcity will lead to an increase in prices, which in turn will lead to a reduction in consumption. One big problem with energy is that it is still way too cheap.
Another problem is that there are a lot of subsidies involved for large consumers as well as extra taxation on small consumers.
The environmental damage would probably also be much less with nuclear, versus a ton of solar + wind + batteries. But there would be disaster danger. It is unclear to me how the danger of nuclear disaster would compare to the danger of running out of stored energy in a winter month.
> Storing a weeks worth of consumption on a 'per person' basis can be done for a fraction of $1m.
How?
Since the costs of storage are currently so huge, it seems to me that if you want to go the solar + wind route, it makes sense to overprovision energy generation. That would reduce the amount of storage you need, and the extra energy during summer would be somewhat useful. Note however that you would need massive amounts of wind+solar.
For an average household to satisfy its electricity needs, it needs ~10 average size solar panels (assuming perfect storage). However, household electricity use is only 5% of our energy use. So to satisfy energy needs with solar, you need approximately 200 solar panels per household. Even if you round that down to 50 due to reduction in energy consumption and use of wind energy, it's still a lot. But the Netherlands is obviously not a very good country for solar. In countries like Australia, the numbers would look way better.
How much storage would actually be required is not clear to me. It depends on a lot of factors. A week doesn't sound totally crazy to me; we certainly want a good safety margin so that society doesn't collapse in a bad winter. If we take super optimistic numbers and have one day of storage and take your factor of 3 reduction in energy use, then the cost of storage alone would still be about twice what we currently pay for the energy. Expensive but certainly a cost that would be possible to pay.
For cars, the factor of three is not "optimistic", it's simple comparison of the respective primary energies consumed by typical vehicles in their respective categories. 20 kWh to drive 100 km = 72 MJ of primary energy. 6 liters of gasoline to drive the same distance = ~220 MJ of primary energy -- roughly triple of the former number.
> A week doesn't sound totally crazy to me; we certainly want a good safety margin so that society doesn't collapse in a bad winter.
Yes, but that doesn't imply you need the capacity to run the country 100% on batteries for a week. That's just not something anyone would ever do. For example, a gas turbine with a low duty cycle would definitely be cheaper than a battery after a certain period of time. So why would you use a battery for that?
Regarding the second paragraph: if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree.
> if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...
I didn't say a word about basing something on fossil fuels.
> that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree
I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to was proposing storing a WEEK's worth of PRIMARY energy in TODAY'S amounts in BATTERIES. Nobody would seriously consider such a contrived scenario; it would be completely pointless. So I can't possibly agree with those numbers.
> I didn't say a word about basing something on fossil fuels.
You said: "Yes, but that doesn't imply you need the capacity to run the country 100% on batteries for a week. That's just not something anyone would ever do. For example, a gas turbine with a low duty cycle would definitely be cheaper than a battery after a certain period of time. So why would you use a battery for that?"
> I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to
Note that I responded to that comment with a calculation showing that that plan is economically infeasible. The scenario is not all all contrived; what that person proposed we need is reasonable, and it would in fact be quite dangerous and insufficient to have only one week's worth. Years in which there is more than a week without wind and hardly any sun (due to winter) occur approximately every 10 years in Germany. Thus calling a week's worth of storage contrived is just wrong. If anything, it's contrived in the direction of not being enough.
I'm pretty sure at the kinds of scale you'd need for a country price per KWH would be significantly less.
It’s sad, and almost infuriating, how an event that would never threaten safe nuclear plant operation in Germany set the stone rolling for “Energiewende”.
Personally i think Germany is making a huge mistake and will regret this course down the road.
Momentum really was gained after fukushima.
Again, my personal opinion, this is a reactionary and short sighted approach answering emotional sentiments not scientific data and facts.
The days of great “german engineering” are mostly (i said “mostly”, ok?) a thing of the past - reality has it that this country lost focus and misses out on vital long-term investements and vision. And unfortunately most of this is driven on a political scale intertwined with classic german big corporations.
The “Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport” has been a joke from the beginning and is a showcase of how incompetent politicians can ruin a country.
Try making a call longer than 20 minutes while driving without it being dropped, charge your car…
Sorry for the rant, but it’s just sad where this is going.
Are there other politicians that are invested into natural gas?
2. The Green party has been born out of the anti-nuclear movement. Without them, Germany would probably use nuclear energy for most of its electricity needs, like France does. If the Green party would embrace nuclear, they would have to admit that the anti-nuclear movement was a huge mistake and it is actually, for a good part, to blame for climate change. Just imagine what the world would look like today if the development of nuclear power plants hadn't been stopped in the 80s and countries used nuclear instead of coal and natural gas.
Countries that need a lot of reserve energy is paying a lot of subsidies to fossil fuels. Year in, year out. First you need to pay them in order to keep the plants on standby when renewables are plenty, and then you need to pay them again when demand exceeds the productions of renewables. The outcome is very large and steady stream of money going into the pockets of those who invest into fossil fuel.
Nuclear would need a lot in order to catch up to the same level of subsidies.
That seems to be proving the oppposite of your point.
It's also interesting that France has generic "electricity" subsidies that are bigger than their "nuclear" subsidies and yet 70% of their electricity is nuclear.
Could you explain the logic behind that idea that France subsidizes to fossil fuel is proof that nuclear is expensive? To me it is proof that the fossil fuel industry will extract its cut as long as the grid is dependent on it.
Also, a technical details. In actually billions, France is not subsidizing fossil fuels more than Germany. France total subsidize is about half of Germany, so the actually money that goes to fossil fuels are quite much smaller as a result.
You said that this was wrong, because countries that deployed renewables needed to pay fossil fuels to standby and then pay them again when there's no wind or sun.
To back this up you pointed to a document about level of subsidies.
That document shows that Germany gives less subsidies to fossil fuels than other countries with nuclear plants, notably France, as a percent of GDP.
You now appear to be trying to wiggle out of this on a technicality because Germany has a bigger economy than France, though even then the final numbers are 12.2 billion vs 11.5 billion.
But, let's pretend that's what you were saying, oh look, countries with nuclear on average subsidize fossil fuels more in absolute terms.
(This is because they are bigger economies, so this is an entirely spurious correlation but even playing by your changed rules, your document doesn't support your argument).
Then she mentioned that she just had bought a new car. I asked what kind, it's a hybrid. I asked why? Well, because her old car was using so much fuel, and with recent price hikes, that became too expensive, so she just bought one that was significantly more fuel efficient.
The _exact_ same person! Just 2 minutes after claiming monetary incentives don't work demonstrated that it actually worked for her!
I have high hopes that price hikes are what convinces people to change their behavior. Not ads, not appealing to ethics or conciousness or "the future of your kids" or pictures of dying polar bears. You need to feel it in your wallet, then you act, plain and simple.
In that case, we should make the price of power relative to your wealth, shouldn't we? I'm guessing you're an academic and work in tech or consulting, so you make two, three times the national average if you live in Germany. Trippling the price of power will barely register on your level, so you have little incentive to conserve energy. However, if we said that e.g. a kwh costs 1/15000 of your personal wealth, you'd have a lot of incentive, because even if you start the year as a billionaire, you'd be broke if you used 15000kwh.
I have a feeling that none of the -typically well-off- proponents of "we must make the people pay more so that they stop consuming" will be a fan of that.
I recently purchased a hybrid vehicle, and I find myself much more conscientious about how much energy I am using.
I wonder: if every house only had a certain allotment of energy each day to use at the “regular” price, would energy consumption go down?
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
This is so stupid, what are they thinking?
Why does that mean they can't switch it off?
The UK had 30% Coal in 2014 when they announced they would phase it out and did so slightly ahead of schedule.
That requirement makes no sense, though. Do you foresee a massive volcanic eruption that there will be darkness for several weeks? Because it's sort of fact of life that the sun always rises tomorrow. Therefore asking for 100% of storage for weeks never made any sense.
It is in Russia's best interest to have EU countries dependent on their fossil fuels (natural gas and coal). This goal is being achieved admirably, with Poland burning coal like crazy (buying lots of Russian coal) and Germany burning Russian gas like crazy (through Nord Stream pipelines).
Shutting down the nuclear plants plays straight into that strategy.
Accelerate what? Wind and solar are at capacity, and storage solutions do not exist at that scale.
Also, it's terrible policy to depend on Putin, which seems obvious to everyone but Germany
AFAIK Russia has been a trustworthy gas supplier and it would be economical suicide if they proved not to be trustworthy.
Free trade requires easy substitutes to remain "free" and opponents of this plan mostly think that energy markets don't work like that because of high switching costs. Germany can not just spin up new nuclear plants or easily buy electricity from neighbors past a certain amount of it's usage. I don't know enough to know if this angle is correct.
Germany's alleged dependence on Russian gas is mostly a fairytale of US propaganda.
The middle east is another potential supplier and Italy, for example, get their gas from Africa. Germany also has the biggest gas storage capacity in Europe and the gas tanks are usually filled quite well before winter (>95%). Not this year though, because the MBAs took a gamble on Nord Stream 2 going operational and lost the wager, resulting in soaring gas prices all across Europe.
You also need to keep in mind that natural gas is not solely used for heating homes, but also industrial processes and generating electricity, among others, which could be reduced or stopped if it really came down to it.
In short: Russia turning off the valves would be more of an inconvenience than the life-threatening situation it is often claimed to be. But personally I don't see that happening, as the Russians have been a very reliable supplier for decades.
But during a crisis, which one do you think will collapse first?
1) Germans freezing to death without energy to heat themselves and move their economy
2) Russians drinking vodka
It doesn’t look like we’ll ever get beyond the politics that would make small scale <10MW installations economically feasible.
It’s really a shame.
Edit: in response to the large number of people bringing up BER and other infrastructure failures in Germany: yes, BER and others may have been bad, but a completely different kind (and magnitude) of incompetence than that which led to the Chernobyl meltdown. They really aren’t comparable.
You don't build nuclear power plants in narrow valleys with known flood events though. I mean, you also don't build wind turbines in swamps and hope they don't fall over, or put solar panels on your roof and don't fasten them.
1. https://www.itv.com/news/2016-02-09/a-history-of-german-trai...
2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59487910
3. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-34324772
Germany has this right: do it now, and deal with it, rather than to continue to kick the can down the road for later generations to solve the problems, a kind of temporeal externalization.
Everybody starts cutting small corners everywhere, assuming it doesn't matter much as all the other people are still doing their job. One day, a corner too many gets cut, and the slack in the system is too small to catch what should be a minor problem.
Don't trust the public facade and official reports, they have been filtered by PR departments and by people not wishing to report bad news to their managers and peers
Are we talking about the same Germany?
Edit: I should probably give some examples: Suttgart 21 train station, BER airport
Hahaha! Haha! Ha. #sad
Are you sure? One example:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-48527308
>BER has become for Germany not a new source of pride but a symbol of engineering catastrophe. It's what top global infrastructure expert Bent Flyvbjerg calls a "national trauma" and an ideal way "to learn how not to do things".
Yes the incidents are scary and news grabbing but that’s it. The actual data is that it’s safe (look at mortality as a function of megawatt hours produced). Not to mention that in the 60-80 years since those plants were designed (Fukushima and Chernobyl are basically the same design if I recall correctly), we’ve gotten much better at designing plants that withstand natural disasters. This is also ignoring the fact that we can do a better job of locating power plants further away from disaster-prone areas due to advances in power distributions systems (eg HVDC).
The problem with nuclear is that there’s a lot of fear still lingering around it from Cold War era propaganda. Any issues just play into and reinforce those fears. The real problem is that education is the only effective tool we know of to fight fear but it’s slow and not up to the challenge that nuclear fission faces. That’s because on top of the fears are actual opponents who will fight any real evidence-based education efforts by playing up the FUD (very old tactic). Fossil fuel companies don’t want it because nuclear presents an existential threat to their existence. US national security interests are worried about proliferation if we’re giving them the benefit of the doubt. It also presents a serious threat to US hegemony if countries are able to establish their own energy independence.
That may very well be true but it's completely irrelevant for future choices. Not building more nuclear plants doesn't mean you'll be building more fossil fuel plants instead.
EDIT: For all the downvoters, see the fourth chart (Gross power production in Germany 1990-2021, by source (non-stacked)) on https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... and explain to me how they're building more fossil fuel power plants over the years while building zero nuclear power plants.
Uhh… Yes it does. The data shows that. An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.
Many people are saying this.
> An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG.
What matters is whether increased reliance on renewables slows down the decarbonisation effort. If you have data which shows that, I'd be interested to see it.
In return, let me offer a study from last year which found: "in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production does associate with a small drop in CO2 emissions. But in comparative terms, this drop is smaller than that associated with investments in renewable energy. And in countries with a low GDP per capita, nuclear electricity production clearly associates with CO2 emissions that tend to be higher."
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/53376
Solar and wind are important parts of the energy mix and.OF COURSE we need them. Nuclear is where the bulk of the focus needs to go though to actually decarbonize because it can handle literally every use case that fossil fuels do but cheaper, safer and less polluting.
We do not have enough batteries in the world, and producing enough of them would take decades, and cost us trillions of dollars. Nuclear power plants are better and cheaper solution.
I just added a source that shows that data tells something completely different. In the past ten years, German renewable generation more than doubled (from annual ~100 TWh to ~250 TWh) while their natural gas consumption for electricity generation today is basically the same as back then (somewhere around 90 TWh annually from gas back then as well as today). Not sure how natural gas stagnation can be described as "large increased reliance".
The Germans import a significant amount (~64%) of their energy from other countries, including France (nuclear) and Poland (coal), but also countries further afield like Norway and Russia.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-dependen...
Nuclear is proven to be our most safe, clean and renewable source of energy.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldw...
Similar with wind turbines, but at least those are so small scale that you can convince closeby towns fast by just letting them participate in the profits. Different story for leaking barrels stored underground.
(And yes, that's how this crap ends up. Just google Asse II and then let's discuss German cleanliness again.)
Anything built after 1972 has not had anywhere near this level of incidents.
Also Chernobyl had severe safety flaws due to its origin as an early model breeder reactor (and my head canon is that the test that caused the disaster was in some way related to surreptitious fuel changing to run breeding experiments. The RBMK reactors were designed for rapid fuel shuffling.... In other words, safety was compromised to keep the door open to the possibility of sneaky weapons grade material production).
Also also, Chernobyl had some other bone-headed flaws, such as a positive void coefficient and positive scram coefficient (read: trying to rapid shutdown during an emergency made the reaction increase). Humanity has learned a ton since then.
IF new generation reactors can prove to be safe and not create waste and decommissioning problems, and if they can be built economically, then they are worthy of consideration.
But power is fungible. If the cheapest next watt-hour is solar or wind, then why spend on anything else?
Not exactly, changes were made to RBMK design after the accident: https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...
There will have to be a whole new generation of plants designed to be cost effective at that scale.
once you're up and running, it's cheap as dirt, just takes decades to pay off the initial investment
Excessive resource extraction causes devastation.
A significant population of residents actually moved back there, despite the restrictions. I believe all of the former residents of Chernobyl (which is actually a tiny village) are now dead, the last old babushka passing in October/November 2016. I visited what was left of her house.
There are still plenty of people living in and around the exclusion zone for various reasons (mostly military).
It is common to downplay the effects of the accident, but it is huge.
(I'm originally from that area.)
Coal plants kill millions of people worldwide every year.
How many people died from Chernobyl? About 50, despite over 100,000 people working at the site on cleanup. The adjacent reactors continued to run and provide power for about a decade after the incident.
How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero.
Zero!
I am surprised you're quoting official Soviet numbers. Numbers that weren't updated since the early days of the accident.
> How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero.
At what cost?
https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/04/1008292
Check for yourself: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...
Happy New Year.
All energy sources are dangerous, the toxic waste from making the batteries required for solar + wind only is no joke.
Unless you count getting taxpayers to shoulder the cost as politics.
if you count roof installers dying/getting injured on the job. do they count or we can just discount them?
New nuclear is a pipe dream (~10-15 years from breaking ground to first kWh produced), but old nuclear generators should be ran as long as safely possible. Big fail on Germany’s part here, although natural gas price spikes will force their hand on more renewables, transmission (including cross border interconnectors), and battery storage.
Looking forward to you providing us with hard numbers.
Can you find 20 people who have died installing solar panels? I found about 7 examples on google globally (3 in the US).
The rest of the pages were the dubious statistics calculating "deaths per TWh" that both downplay cancer deaths from nuclear power and extrapolate tens of thousands of falling-off-rooftop-deaths if we generated as much electricity from our residential rooftops as we would from nuclear (which we wouldnt, rooftop solar will always be comparatively minor).
This says very little about solar it just says that clambering about on roofs kills people.
According to what number? This WHO article says it is estimated to be about 4000 deaths:
https://www.who.int/news/item/05-09-2005-chernobyl-the-true-...
There were many much higher estimates made in 1986 when the disaster happened, but they turned out to be wrong. Apparently small amounts of radiation spread out over many people doesn't increase cancer rates. There were very noticeable increases in cancer near the disaster area, but most of those cancer patients survived.
> A total of up to 4000 people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.
Some of the costs of a nuclear weapons program can be shared. This is probably partly why France invested heavily in it and why countries keen on it coincidentall almos always have nuclear arsenals. It's unlikely it's because they're secretly authoritarian.
Way cheaper than nuclear in USA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#:~:t....
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_sourc...
Fukushima on other hand is insignificant. Not really having much effect on anything.
WTF?! Are you not aware of the constant amount of waste water being poured into the Pacific? [0] Or the absurdly high amount of Cesium being found in migrating Tuna? The amount of cancers and heart related issues is still unfolding to this day, particularly in the children from the surrounding areas.
And the people who were forced to evacuate and then forced out of the shelters with nothing to go back to would have a huge issue with what you have said.
I cant believe anyone not from TEPCO or the Nuclear Village would say such a blatantly stupid and calloused thing!
0: https://globalvoices.org/2021/12/30/despite-widespread-oppos...
1: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna47592012
Perhaps evacuating unnecessarily large areas was the problem in the first place. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095758201...
Academic handwaving after the event has very little bearing on the amount of Human suffering that took place, the displacement and the impoverishment and degrading experiences (Fukushima victims lived in a FEMA camp like situation and were deemed untouchable in Japanese Society like the Hibakusha before them and incurred massive property losses in addition to the Human costs) furthermore it's hard to explain the severity to people who have never experienced a Nuclear incident themselves. The level of scaring you're left with, the PTSD that comes with it is something very few living Humans can relate or truly empathize with and I speak from experience.
You're never the same, you come close with the reality that this technology was not fully thought-out in the 20th century when it was created and built with near headlong fervor with no thought to the repercussions of it going wrong--and in most cases it's at a time your in a life-death situation.
Most plants are built in the coastal area and often only have one way in and one way out because of the cost and practical aspects of building freeways along the coast. You are essentially trapped in when everyone tries to evacuate on their own and you're left with the realization that the energy that was generated was mainly exported at a profit for a private company who will later find ways to absolve themselves of criminal negligence and declare bankruptcy before restitution is ever made to the areas where it was built--look at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Edison, and going back to Bectel in the 70s with SONGS.
And regulators like the NRC will simply acquiesce and allow for the waste material to lay in an actively seismic area that if unsettled could be just as catastrophic to the Ocean and local area as if the plant were still operational. They assumed NV would continue to take it, and were left with no other solution when they refused.
To be clear: I'm more optimistic about 21st Century approaches to Nuclear than I was to 20th, which I would say was a DOA thing for me after having lived through SONGS, due to the effects of climate change (the ongoing Boulder fire being the most recent proving how absurd this has gotten) but that doesn't detract from the fact that Nuclear needs to be far more monitored and regulated in terms of waste management and city planning before a single brick is laid down.
With that said, I'm glad Diablo Canyon was shut down, if fusion is just around the corner than hopefully that will be what takes SONGS and DC place when its ready, but until then solar, wind and other forms of renewable are more suitable alternatives to fossil fuel plants.
Furthermore, it's biggest proponents should be forced to live to next one for the lifetime of the plant. I can't see how that be enforced but the way some of you speak with such hubris like it's the most easiest and practical thing to do speaks volumes of just how ignorant and detached you really are from reality of the drawbacks of nuclear plants and the immense complexity that comes with them.
10 times higher levels than normal of a single radioactive element is still not dangerous, especially since this is temporary. The main dangers with eating tuna still comes from their high mercury content, which is mainly due to coal power plants.
> The levels of radioactive cesium were 10 times higher than the amount measured in tuna off the California coast in previous years. But even so, that's still far below safe-to-eat limits set by the U.S. and Japanese governments.
The number of direct fatalities of those is fortunately low.
Ever wondered why solar is exploding? Low price.
The whole policy really doesn't make a lot of sense, it's not pro-fossil fuel or anti-fossil fuel, it's not pro-Russia or anti-Russia. It's all of the above, which is worse, since it's anti-everything and pro-everything. It suggests German leadership is too incompetent to pursue their own interests and so they are effectively acting randomly.
[0] https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&...
https://app.electricitymap.org/map
I think it's unfortunate given the climate, energy and geopolitical situation, but the Government is doing what the people clearly want it to do.
Not saying I'm pro or against Brexit, just that your point seems to corroborate their decision to leave.
Yet one of the worst outcomes fighting the virus. "UK had one of Europe’s highest excess death rates in under 65s" in 2020.[a] In practice, what did the EU really get wrong with the vaccines, other than generating some unjustifiably smug headlines from the UK right-wing press? The UK can't even say it got a good deal on the vaccines, having paid 50% more per dose than than EU.[b]
[a] https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n799
[b] https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n281
> Yet one of the worst outcomes fighting the virus. "UK had one of Europe’s highest excess death rates in under 65s" in 2020
Very disingenious to quote pre-vaccination death rates and studies from 2020. I am specifically talking about post-vaccination phase of UK. They have 70% vaccination rate, much higher than EU which is at abysmal 54% (Data from Nov 2021). https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/24/only-54percent-of-europe-is-...
Quoting misleading data and then immediately jumping on to bashing right-wing UK media isn't helping your arugments.
Here is the WHO data on vaccination rates, UK sits at the very tippy top: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
So it's not at all clear that the UK would have been in a worse position if it had been able to take advantage of the EU's lower vaccine price, and in any case, being an EU member wouldn't have prevented the UK from securing its own vaccine supply, as Hungary did.
[0] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
It's sad and strange that we treat it as if it had caused hundreds or thousands of deaths, and our response to it is to increase fossil fuel use, which definitely will lead to more death and pollution.
Read for yourself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_nuclear_disaster
My understanding was that root-cause was old design and not sufficiently secure back-up power and failure to get such on site. Which could have been done, but was not.
The outcome we had for Fukushima was not the only one possible. It could have been better, much better, and it could have been worse, much worse. That fact that one of the most advanced and earthquake prepared nations in the world even got close to having a Fukushima event, let alone actually had one, should paint a clear picture of pitfalls of nuclear power.
We need power the scales for the world. The most urgent need for clean power is in developing countries, which are actually not the countries who would have the best chance to run a safe nuclear power plant.
Solar is already scaling, it's already safe, it's already cost effective. Utility-scale storage is already more than on the way and is dropping in price quickly, and it's not even a problem with solar until solar penetrates a larger percentage of the grid anyways. Do I think that nuclear plants in modern countries should be shutting down: No. But the real justification to supporting nuclear over solar for the future of our power grid is to be a contrarian or because you think nuclear power is cool.
And solar won't be replacing the nuclear plants that are being shut down. Coal and gas will.
I already stated that I don't support the shutting down of existing nuclear plants. But it hardly matters, the plants shutting down a very small part of the global grid, what matters is the future of the grid. Solar and wind with storage should be the future of the grid.
Intercontinental connections are possible, but what options we have Africa, Russia and Middle-East? Not exactly stable options. So local production is only real solution and nuclear is very reasonable option from carbon standpoint.
Getting rid of nuclear to reduce electricity supply and then supplanting that with wind/solar is borderline evil.
The EU have a consistent policy of leaving Putin an option to put pressure or just straight up capture some land to the East of German border by making sure the gas won't stop flowing in case that happens.
How does Nuclear Power stop mining? I see how it would reduce the need for coal, but it won’t change our appetite for metals, rocks, or gemstones.
Tough times are coming.