Unfortunately popular sentiment doesn't equate to scientific fact. Nuclear power is cleaner, safer and less environmentally damaging than fossil fuels in every way. Still, since when have politicians ever let facts get in the way of campaigning for power?
We are not choosing between nuclear and fossils - we have chosen renewables.
Clarification: I'm not German. I'm talking globally and long term. What's happening right now in Germany is just a blip. The big picture:
> Clean power growth is likely to exceed electricity demand growth in 2023; this would be the first year for this to happen outside of a recession. With average growth in electricity demand and clean power, we forecast that 2023 will see a small fall in fossil generation (-47 TWh, -0.3%), with bigger falls in subsequent years as wind and solar grow further. That would mean 2022 hit “peak” emissions. A new era of falling power sector emissions is close.
Germany exports more power than it imports. And France is only a part of the imports, with 2022 being much lower due to their issues with the nuclear power plants.
Large power exports come necessarily from using non-dispatchable forms of power generation like solar and wind. Other people who can turn off their power plants will buy yours rather than burning their own resources. In other words, the amount of power a nation exports means very little about how you keep the lights on.
We have not chosen renewables: if you compute how much oil for transport, coal for Chinese electricity, etc. you need to produce solar panels, as well as massive mining impacts, you realise that the new renewables (solar and wind, not hydro) are a complete dead end with current technology. A renewables world made only with renewable end-to-end production looks more like the year 1800 than any Green knows or would be prepared to admit.
My stock comment for that is: bury it deep and with signs; if we've lost the ability to read the signs, we've lost the ability to dig deep and endanger ourselves.
I'm not saying nuclear is worse than fossil fuels, just that we don't know the future impact of waste with such a long half-life. So I don't think it's demonstrably cleaner "in every way".
Fossil fuel waste goes straight into the atmosphere is and is killing millions of people through climate change and respiratory diseases. And not forgetting slag piles and other fossil fuel waste (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aberfan_disaster).
Nuclear waste has killed possibly a few hundred people at best.
You should also take in consideration, that nuclear waste is dangerous over a very long period of time. So a couple hundred now might turn into millions until the waste is no longer dangerous.
>You should also take in consideration, that nuclear waste is dangerous over a very long period of time. So a couple hundred now might turn into millions until the waste is no longer dangerous.
Take into consideration the burning of fossil fuels over a very long period of time. Billions.
yes, and it's so dense that it fits in a ridiculous amount of space, unlike coal that will put cancer-causing dusts everywhere in the air for decades to come. Enjoy.
That does not mean the plan has to be followed through without amendment today - in fact, it cannot be, unless restarting lignite-burning generators was part of the original plan. Responsibility for this development lies squarely on all those who chose this path today (and regardless of party affiliation.)
This was not decided by the greens only. From the article:
> Yet the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 caused German sentiments to shift strongly against atomic energy once more, and Ms. Merkel abruptly reversed course. Her government passed a law to phase out Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors by the end of 2022.
Similarly in the neighbouring Austria, nuclear power is prohibited in the constitution, not by a political party.
> There really should be a rule that important decisions can’t pass with a tiny majority
There are at least two major problems with such a rule:
(1) On an important question, “yes” and “no” are both important decisions.
(2) Who decides what is “important”?
You can make a rule that is closer to “you can’t make specific kinds of deviations from the status quo without a supermajority vote”, but that’s…very different from “important decisions”.
Good politicians deliver the end goal people want (e.g. cheap and clean electricity), in the best way scientifically possible, then convince their base their method was the right decision.
Bad politicians ask people how they should do a thing, then do that thing.
It's been awhile since Germany has had good politicians where energy is concerned.
Fair. The whole point was that gas was supposed to be the "Plan B" bridge to ensure flex and resiliency during the cutover to renewables.
Then they did away with a big component of "Plan A" in nuclear after Fukushima, which promoted Russian gas to an essential component of their transition energy mix.
At the end of the day, if Germany hadn't stopped building nuclear or decommissioned reactors, Ukraine probably wouldn't have been invaded.
I think it's not that far fetched to assume Russia had big influence in shaping the anti nuclear narrative and "building relationships" with key politicians.
Russia didn't make a rational decision: we know that Putin hid the plan from most of his subordinates, ignored concerns presented by the rest, and the system withheld important facts from him likewise. He made a huge gamble with his "3-day special operation".
Also, the nuclear plants would have provided only a partial backup for the Russian gas, as electricity from the plants couldn't replace the direct use of gas in German houses and industry anyway.
A bad one, because their facts were wrong, but one based off calculations rather than rolling dice:
+ Russian Cold War-era (and refits of same) military materiel is reaching obsolescence and end of life. Russia can't afford to modernize its military at scale (hence the obsession with announcing prototype superweapons)
+ US and European ties are at a low point, as a consequence of the Trump presidency
+ US is focused on China as a peer threat
+ Germany is uniquely diplomatically vulnerable to gas energy pressure, but only until additional renewables come online, transmission infrastructure is upgraded, and efficiency measures implemented (see the Nord Stream bombing whodoneit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sa... )
... ergo, there was no better time to make the attempt than now. Everyone just assumed Putin wouldn't be stupid enough to try.
But that calculation looks very different without the energy vulnerability, as Russia understands the economic difference between themselves and Germany.
They are probably being downvoted because they are pinning the decisions lead by CDU on the Green party. If they didn't misrepresent the situation they most likely would not get downvoted. Funny how that works, no?
The CDU adopted their environmental policies precisely to out-green the Greens and undercut their support. If the Greens hadn't been so vehemently anti-nuclear, the CDU wouldn't have gone in that direction. But ultimately this is on the German voting public, a large portion of whom have had an irrational aversion to nuclear for a long time.
> The CDU adopted their environmental policies precisely to out-green the Greens and undercut their support. If the Greens hadn't been so vehemently anti-nuclear, the CDU wouldn't have gone in that direction.
I agree with this, but this in no way absolves the CDU. If they try to undercut another parties support and pass legislation with negative effects, it's their fault, not the fault of the party they undercut.
> But ultimately this is on the German voting public, a large portion of whom have had an irrational aversion to nuclear for a long time.
Aside from whether I agree with the aversion being irrational, this is definitely true. The CDU was following public sentiment.
Danish TV just had a documentary, regarding nuclear power. It's basically the "reporter" who is reconsidering his life long hostility towards nuclear power. In the documentary there's an interesting point: The opponents never wanted coal either, they firmly believe that a no to nuclear was a yes to solar and wind. That part of the message just got lost, and it was not particularly realistic either.
It's incredibly naive, but it's the same mentality in present day nuclear opponents. They still fail to see that a no to nuclear is often a yes to coal, oil and gas.
Actually CDU, the christian democrats, were in charge when this was decided and for most of the period while they were planning and executing that decision. Angela Merkel was in charge for 16 years until handing over to the new coalition months before the Ukrainian invasion. The CDU is a conservative party. And seriously, trying to pass off Angela Merkel as a tree hugging hippy would be quite a feat.
The thing is, this was a widely supported decision that has by and large gone through without a lot of opposition in a country that reliably votes for conservatives and moderates to lead them. Also, none of the bad stuff that people predicted would happen has actually happened. No blackouts. No massive increase in coal/gas usage. None of that seems to be happening.
Yeah, what’s even more hilarious: Conservatives made the decision to shut down the nuclear plants and also destroyed the German renewable sector at the same time.
But voters have a short term memory and will blame it all on the current administration.
2 of the 3 currently governing parties made up the coalition that first decided to end nuclear back in 2001. The later conservative Merkel government just first extended reactor life-times just to go back on its word and shorten them again when Fukushima happened.
But all the big parties and their politicians had a hand in the current desaster, people are quit right to blame all the last 25 years' governments.
The entire concept of the "Energiewende" was implemented without putting the right constraints in place. The conservatives later fumbled it instead of adding the right changes.
What happened is that the subsidies for renewable energy in Germany mostly led to a buildup of a huge photovoltaic industry in China after an initial goldrush in Europe. When they changed the incentive scheme, the German photovoltaic industry crumbled and the chinese one was kept afloat with local subsidies.
For a while, the equipment suppliers in Europe still profited from the boom in China, but where eventually replaced by Chinese ones. In effect, now both the photovoltaic industry and the equipment industry in Europe largely disappeared.
And to add insult to injury, China is considering to limit photovoltaic exports (potentially as a means to counter the semiconductor sacntions):
Nuclear is the ONLY gigawatt scale dispatchable very low carbon source of electricity humans have at the moment, other than hydroelectric damns but we have used up pretty much all available capacity. If you refuse to use it then you are going to have to burn coal or gas instead. That is why Germany emits 6 times more CO2 per KWh than France.
> But voters have a short term memory and will blame it all on the current administration.
Which for some countries means blaming the greens in the current government even though they were absent from previous governments from the last 15 years.
Currently mostly coal (mostly lignite) with a little imported LNG for base load and peaks. Wind and solar if available. Rest is imported nuclear, coal and other power from neighboring countries.
Longer term, a switch to 100% renewables is planned, which is supposed to take 20 years. However, plans are coming along too slowly, especially regarding storage and transmission lines. But also necessary ramp-up of wind and solar installations is extremely lacking. Meanwhile power prices are at an all-time high and no betterment in sight. Meanwhile a switch to mostly-electric transportation, green steel smelting, green concrete production, and mostly electric heating should happen, which will roughly triple electricity consumption overall.
So I guess we'll wait and see, most probably more of the imported whatever-we-can-get at stellar prices.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany was reopening five power plants that burn lignite, a low-rank coal. Germany’s return to lignite demonstrates, yet again, the Iron Law of Electricity, which says that people, businesses, and governments will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.
Indeed, Germany’s move back to lignite is chock-full of contradictions, including one that belongs in the “you can’t make this up” column.
The Iron Law of Electricity is so powerful that the utility RWE is dismantling the Keyenberg wind project in the western part of the country to, wait for it... make more room for the expansion of the Garzweiler mine. Lignite from Garzweiler fuels the Neurath C power plant, which is one of the power plants being brought back online. A spokesperson for RWE told the Guardian newspaper that “We realize this comes across as paradoxical.”
Yes, there are paradoxes aplenty. Germany’s need to keep the lights on explains why the government is willing to ignore the fact that burning lignite to produce electricity emits more carbon dioxide than any other form of power generation.
Furthermore, burning lignite contradicts Germany’s climate goals. Under the country’s much-vaunted Energiewende (German for “energy turnaround”) Germany has pledged to slash its total greenhouse gas emissions by 95% by 2050. The cost of that pledge could total more than $500 billion by 2025 — and that figure only accounts for the investment needed to decarbonize the electricity sector. The result of all that spending is that residents of Germany are now paying some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.
The cost of “going green” is the delta between the cost of green power and the cost of providing electricity without going green. That’s nowhere close to 500B by 2025.
Part of this discrepancy was them paying off an extremely premature investment in PV solar in attempt to kick start domestic production. Back in 2009 they setup 39 euro cents/kWh feed in tariffs for solar. Those subsidies where quickly cut on new installations but as I understand it they are still paying it on those early installs. The good news is those will be expiring fairly soon and arguably those initial investments are paying dividends in current rock bottom prices for new installations.
You'll have to properly frame your statement for it to make sense. Are you talking about one plant over its lifetime? How long is the lifetime? What kind of coal is burned in that plant? How big is the plant?
Also we don't know about all the nuclear accidents, do you mean all known civilian nuclear power plant accidents?
Coal contains between 1 to 10 ppm of uranium. Globally about 8 billion tonnes of coal is burned every year to generate electricity. Thus between 8 thousand and 80 thousand tonnes of Uranium is emitted into the atmosphere every year.
It's not a a useful measure, since no one would collect uranium in this way but assuming someone would.
Some napkin math... 27 tonnes per 1GW reactor/year is used and there are about 440 reactors so about 12kton.
MW by MW, coal plants emit more radiation than nuclear on average. This is true even when taking accidents into account, and not by a small factor.
We’d genuinely be better off ignoring most accidents and just using nuclear. Not to mention that coal ashes and emissions are chemically carcinogenic as well.
>Germany’s need to keep the lights on explains why the government is willing to ignore the fact that burning lignite to produce electricity emits more carbon dioxide than any other form of power generation.
Exiting nuclear was once according to then-current public sentiment. Problem is, all governments in the last 30 years have been populist power-hungry careerists without any regard for longer-term science-based policy. They just did what seemed the easiest way to get over the next election.
Anti-nuclear-people have mostly been a vocal minority. However, due to mostly anti-science reporting and irresponsible media-spread panic after Czernobyl and Fukushima, there have been temporary majorities for a shutdown, which populist politicians used to get (re)elected.
Germany is now currently advocating to sanction and ban Russian nuclear imports and maintenance on most European reactors, but is happily importing russian gas in the meantime…
When this was announced over 10 years ago, the overwhelming majority of people concluded it's a shame they will be replaced with coal. Fast forward ten years and the use of coal is at a record low, the use of gas has not really changed in a meaningful way and overall the situation has improved significantly on its own, but especially compared to some other developed countries. E.g. the US is still at 60% fossil fuels and not going down faster than Germany. This should be a bigger problem, but it's not really talked about, and neither is the per capita consumption a.k.a. efficiency which is in the US abysmal.
People should focus more on outcomes of policies and not their favorite tech. If they'd do that it would be easy to see that nuclear has existed for 70 years and it has failed to replace fossil fuels worldwide in a meaningful way. To me it's obvious the costs are prohibitive and this is unlikely to change. It hasn't thus far. If someone can get it done, by all means, but it hasn't happened. Instead we hear about small modular which was already tried in the 80s because of the high upfront investments of large plants, but those turned out not to work because of even higher per MWh costs. So it was back to huge plants which again turned out to be difficult to build. I am seeing a pattern here.
Renewables are accomplishing a lot more and a lot faster and there's no need to waste resources on something else. If they can't get us to 100% they can get us as fast as possible to whatever is possible. And thus far all the predictions on what is realistic for renewables as a percentage of the grid have failed dramatically.
> Fast forward ten years and the use of coal is at a record low, the use of gas has not really changed in a meaningful way and overall the situation has improved significantly on its own
Now imagine how much lower it would be had they kept the nuclear plants.
Are you suggesting that one country didn't have the exact same trajectory as another completely different country because of this one arbitrary variable? And you can't think of any other reason? Like the US's huge car culture, or the native oil drilling and gas production industries, or the tendency to project military power across the world to ensure a stable and cheap oil supply at the cost of human lives?
It's difficult to say I am suggesting anything considering I already explicitly wrote it: the thing people should focus on is the actual outcome. And here we have a country that uses less fossil fuels for electricity production (do not see what cars have to do with anything), and is on a faster trajectory of reduction. Claiming that it could've been even faster implies either of the two things:
1) possession of a crystal ball to view an alternative reality
2) certainty that there is no dependence between spending money on nuclear and other things
I don't think that 2) is true. The disposal of existing nuclear waste will cost the tax payers over €100B [1] and sometimes it's better to make a hard cut so people can focus on the future and not the past. Either way, it's been successful.
Was it a struggle? Seemed like fairly boring long term planning.
Next up for phase out, Coal.
I would until recently have bet that Germany would phase out Coal before the USA, but the recent IRA changes might have made it a competitive race again.
Germany will shut down its three remaining nuclear reactors by April 16, ending nuclear power generation in Europe's largest economy. Germany's move, which marks the end of a decades-long fight by environmentalists, makes it an outlier in much of the industrialised world, including Britain, France, Finland, and Poland, which are expanding their nuclear energy programs as part of their plans to reach ambitious climate targets. The decision comes at a time when Europe is grappling with the question of how to secure enough energy to drive its economies and keep homes warm while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Some scientists and Nobel Prize laureates from across the globe have urged Germany to reconsider its decision to phase out nuclear power, citing it as a valuable alternative to power plants spewing greenhouse gases. However, Robert Habeck, the economy minister, insists that Germany can manage the nuclear exit, stating that the country's energy system will be structured differently, relying on 80% renewable energies by 2030.
125 comments
[ 77.9 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] threadGreen party is really ruining and I'm amazed people still give them votes
Clarification: I'm not German. I'm talking globally and long term. What's happening right now in Germany is just a blip. The big picture:
> Clean power growth is likely to exceed electricity demand growth in 2023; this would be the first year for this to happen outside of a recession. With average growth in electricity demand and clean power, we forecast that 2023 will see a small fall in fossil generation (-47 TWh, -0.3%), with bigger falls in subsequent years as wind and solar grow further. That would mean 2022 hit “peak” emissions. A new era of falling power sector emissions is close.
https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electrici...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2022/10/28/the-iron...
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2023/03...
Actually not every way though.. nuclear waste has to go somewhere.
I don't understand your argument; of course waste must go somewhere. Nuclear power, with its waste, is still cleaner than fossil fuels in every way.
My stock comment for that is: bury it deep and with signs; if we've lost the ability to read the signs, we've lost the ability to dig deep and endanger ourselves.
No, we've got a pretty good idea.
>So I don't think it's demonstrably cleaner "in every way".
It is, objectively.
Nuclear waste has killed possibly a few hundred people at best.
Not if we store it properly, like we already do.
Take into consideration the burning of fossil fuels over a very long period of time. Billions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASTRID_(reactor)
yes, and it's so dense that it fits in a ridiculous amount of space, unlike coal that will put cancer-causing dusts everywhere in the air for decades to come. Enjoy.
That does not mean the plan has to be followed through without amendment today - in fact, it cannot be, unless restarting lignite-burning generators was part of the original plan. Responsibility for this development lies squarely on all those who chose this path today (and regardless of party affiliation.)
So they were populists?
> Yet the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in 2011 caused German sentiments to shift strongly against atomic energy once more, and Ms. Merkel abruptly reversed course. Her government passed a law to phase out Germany’s 17 nuclear reactors by the end of 2022.
Similarly in the neighbouring Austria, nuclear power is prohibited in the constitution, not by a political party.
https://youtu.be/WUVZbBBHrI4
Which is funny, because we actually built a pretty much complete nuclear power plant, Zwentendorf. It‘s now a unique museum.
A vote of just 50.47 % ruined our radiant future...
Also we do have one research reactor left right in the city. I was blessed enough to visit it once.
There really should be a rule that important decisions can't pass with a tiny majority
There are at least two major problems with such a rule:
(1) On an important question, “yes” and “no” are both important decisions.
(2) Who decides what is “important”?
You can make a rule that is closer to “you can’t make specific kinds of deviations from the status quo without a supermajority vote”, but that’s…very different from “important decisions”.
Bad politicians ask people how they should do a thing, then do that thing.
It's been awhile since Germany has had good politicians where energy is concerned.
Then they did away with a big component of "Plan A" in nuclear after Fukushima, which promoted Russian gas to an essential component of their transition energy mix.
At the end of the day, if Germany hadn't stopped building nuclear or decommissioned reactors, Ukraine probably wouldn't have been invaded.
Russia surely nudged, but if Germany hadn't already been trending in that direction then it wouldn't have stuck.
Putin invaded Ukraine because he wanted to, and Germany had nothing to do with that.
The belief that Germany would rather sacrifice Ukraine than lose Russian gas would have been less plausible if 30% nuclear energy had been retained.
Russia didn't make a rational decision: we know that Putin hid the plan from most of his subordinates, ignored concerns presented by the rest, and the system withheld important facts from him likewise. He made a huge gamble with his "3-day special operation".
Also, the nuclear plants would have provided only a partial backup for the Russian gas, as electricity from the plants couldn't replace the direct use of gas in German houses and industry anyway.
A bad one, because their facts were wrong, but one based off calculations rather than rolling dice:
+ Russian Cold War-era (and refits of same) military materiel is reaching obsolescence and end of life. Russia can't afford to modernize its military at scale (hence the obsession with announcing prototype superweapons)
+ US and European ties are at a low point, as a consequence of the Trump presidency
+ US is focused on China as a peer threat
+ Germany is uniquely diplomatically vulnerable to gas energy pressure, but only until additional renewables come online, transmission infrastructure is upgraded, and efficiency measures implemented (see the Nord Stream bombing whodoneit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sa... )
+ Remaining ex-Warsaw Pact / non-NATO countries are likely accede to NATO in the next few years (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlargement_of_NATO#Current_... )
... ergo, there was no better time to make the attempt than now. Everyone just assumed Putin wouldn't be stupid enough to try.
But that calculation looks very different without the energy vulnerability, as Russia understands the economic difference between themselves and Germany.
I agree with this, but this in no way absolves the CDU. If they try to undercut another parties support and pass legislation with negative effects, it's their fault, not the fault of the party they undercut.
> But ultimately this is on the German voting public, a large portion of whom have had an irrational aversion to nuclear for a long time.
Aside from whether I agree with the aversion being irrational, this is definitely true. The CDU was following public sentiment.
It's incredibly naive, but it's the same mentality in present day nuclear opponents. They still fail to see that a no to nuclear is often a yes to coal, oil and gas.
The thing is, this was a widely supported decision that has by and large gone through without a lot of opposition in a country that reliably votes for conservatives and moderates to lead them. Also, none of the bad stuff that people predicted would happen has actually happened. No blackouts. No massive increase in coal/gas usage. None of that seems to be happening.
But voters have a short term memory and will blame it all on the current administration.
But all the big parties and their politicians had a hand in the current desaster, people are quit right to blame all the last 25 years' governments.
What happened is that the subsidies for renewable energy in Germany mostly led to a buildup of a huge photovoltaic industry in China after an initial goldrush in Europe. When they changed the incentive scheme, the German photovoltaic industry crumbled and the chinese one was kept afloat with local subsidies.
For a while, the equipment suppliers in Europe still profited from the boom in China, but where eventually replaced by Chinese ones. In effect, now both the photovoltaic industry and the equipment industry in Europe largely disappeared.
And to add insult to injury, China is considering to limit photovoltaic exports (potentially as a means to counter the semiconductor sacntions):
https://www.scmp.com/business/article/3208206/chinas-propose...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291750/carbon-intensity...
Which for some countries means blaming the greens in the current government even though they were absent from previous governments from the last 15 years.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertbryce/2022/10/28/the-iron...
Longer term, a switch to 100% renewables is planned, which is supposed to take 20 years. However, plans are coming along too slowly, especially regarding storage and transmission lines. But also necessary ramp-up of wind and solar installations is extremely lacking. Meanwhile power prices are at an all-time high and no betterment in sight. Meanwhile a switch to mostly-electric transportation, green steel smelting, green concrete production, and mostly electric heating should happen, which will roughly triple electricity consumption overall.
So I guess we'll wait and see, most probably more of the imported whatever-we-can-get at stellar prices.
How are they gonna do it, by exterminating 50% of the population?
- 33% coal - 11% natural gas - 24% wind - 11% solar - 6% nuclear
Nuclear was already winding down with only 6% in 2022. Medium term renewables are growing and will replace it, short term coal and gas.
The economic potential wasted in this country over the past ~30 years by shortsighted political self-sabotage is almost hilarious.
And after 50 years of sub-replacement fertility, now we'll get wrecked even harder by what's going to happen with this graphic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#/med...
Of course, it all comes so suddenly...
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/15-millionen-tonnen-mehr-co2-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that Germany was reopening five power plants that burn lignite, a low-rank coal. Germany’s return to lignite demonstrates, yet again, the Iron Law of Electricity, which says that people, businesses, and governments will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.
Indeed, Germany’s move back to lignite is chock-full of contradictions, including one that belongs in the “you can’t make this up” column.
The Iron Law of Electricity is so powerful that the utility RWE is dismantling the Keyenberg wind project in the western part of the country to, wait for it... make more room for the expansion of the Garzweiler mine. Lignite from Garzweiler fuels the Neurath C power plant, which is one of the power plants being brought back online. A spokesperson for RWE told the Guardian newspaper that “We realize this comes across as paradoxical.”
Yes, there are paradoxes aplenty. Germany’s need to keep the lights on explains why the government is willing to ignore the fact that burning lignite to produce electricity emits more carbon dioxide than any other form of power generation.
Furthermore, burning lignite contradicts Germany’s climate goals. Under the country’s much-vaunted Energiewende (German for “energy turnaround”) Germany has pledged to slash its total greenhouse gas emissions by 95% by 2050. The cost of that pledge could total more than $500 billion by 2025 — and that figure only accounts for the investment needed to decarbonize the electricity sector. The result of all that spending is that residents of Germany are now paying some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.
Prematurely shutting down nuclear looks like a dumb decision, but Germany has been mismanaging their electric grid for decades.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267541/germany-monthly-...
Part of this discrepancy was them paying off an extremely premature investment in PV solar in attempt to kick start domestic production. Back in 2009 they setup 39 euro cents/kWh feed in tariffs for solar. Those subsidies where quickly cut on new installations but as I understand it they are still paying it on those early installs. The good news is those will be expiring fairly soon and arguably those initial investments are paying dividends in current rock bottom prices for new installations.
Also we don't know about all the nuclear accidents, do you mean all known civilian nuclear power plant accidents?
Certainly it’s in the ballpark.
We’d genuinely be better off ignoring most accidents and just using nuclear. Not to mention that coal ashes and emissions are chemically carcinogenic as well.
And best of all, more radioactive waste as well
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-sees-ti...
Not in Germany
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1291750/carbon-intensity...
No, its not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/04/13/germany-r...
People should focus more on outcomes of policies and not their favorite tech. If they'd do that it would be easy to see that nuclear has existed for 70 years and it has failed to replace fossil fuels worldwide in a meaningful way. To me it's obvious the costs are prohibitive and this is unlikely to change. It hasn't thus far. If someone can get it done, by all means, but it hasn't happened. Instead we hear about small modular which was already tried in the 80s because of the high upfront investments of large plants, but those turned out not to work because of even higher per MWh costs. So it was back to huge plants which again turned out to be difficult to build. I am seeing a pattern here.
Renewables are accomplishing a lot more and a lot faster and there's no need to waste resources on something else. If they can't get us to 100% they can get us as fast as possible to whatever is possible. And thus far all the predictions on what is realistic for renewables as a percentage of the grid have failed dramatically.
Now imagine how much lower it would be had they kept the nuclear plants.
1) possession of a crystal ball to view an alternative reality 2) certainty that there is no dependence between spending money on nuclear and other things
I don't think that 2) is true. The disposal of existing nuclear waste will cost the tax payers over €100B [1] and sometimes it's better to make a hard cut so people can focus on the future and not the past. Either way, it's been successful.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d...
Next up for phase out, Coal.
I would until recently have bet that Germany would phase out Coal before the USA, but the recent IRA changes might have made it a competitive race again.
Germany will shut down its three remaining nuclear reactors by April 16, ending nuclear power generation in Europe's largest economy. Germany's move, which marks the end of a decades-long fight by environmentalists, makes it an outlier in much of the industrialised world, including Britain, France, Finland, and Poland, which are expanding their nuclear energy programs as part of their plans to reach ambitious climate targets. The decision comes at a time when Europe is grappling with the question of how to secure enough energy to drive its economies and keep homes warm while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Some scientists and Nobel Prize laureates from across the globe have urged Germany to reconsider its decision to phase out nuclear power, citing it as a valuable alternative to power plants spewing greenhouse gases. However, Robert Habeck, the economy minister, insists that Germany can manage the nuclear exit, stating that the country's energy system will be structured differently, relying on 80% renewable energies by 2030.