If the green movement had any sense they would be promoting nuclear and lobbying to get plants built asap. Instead most of the green movement is against nuclear and only make things worse, i.e. germany now using huge amounts of coal.
The green movement's main job is to convince the rest of the policymakers to take the bull by the horns, the rest is just technical details. Though nuclear can't do much in the near term and it doesn't seem cost competitive at any timescale.
We shouldn't need the green movement for this, the catastrophe is obvious now and has been for a long time, the needed policies have been talked about endlessly in intergovernmental climate summits etc.
Not the best source, I think I have seen better where you can see all the different sources in one graph.
Anyhow, you still can't eat mushrooms in certain places in Germany. And some wild boar meet has to be tested (they eat the muschrooms) All because of nuclear. And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem. I'm not against nuclear, I'm against nuclear in Germany until we prove we have our shit together.
> And it looks like they might not solve the Asse II problem
For those who wonder: Asse II is a salt mine that has been used for storing radioactive waste. That started as “place barrels in rows, leave space for inspection” but later turned into “roll barrels onto the heap”, making inspection impossible.
You could make the argument that they could have phased coal out even faster if they'd kept nuclear and did the massive renewables rollout at the same time but generally people advocating strongly for nuclear while attacking environmental groups or left wing political groups are wildly divergent from reality and so don't bother.
You are right I was mistaken. However Germany is still a basket case. If you want to move to a low carbon economy, you can not do it with renewables only and must be able to maintain equal power generation levels. Germany is producing less power than before and thus shooting their economy in the foot. Nuclear is the only practical solution.
Other replies think you're taking about baseload fallacy.
I think you are talking about the reduction in total electricity generation.
This (and similar stats) get tied to the "environmentalists are killing industry/civilization" arguments.
Except, since the nuclear phase out started in 2000 the electricity generation has only dropped about 70TWh. And about 50 TWh of that was exported. And it's not clear if those numbers include the 12TWh of German behind-the-meter solar, which would leave electricity use flat at a time when LED lighting was reducing demand, similar to many Western nations.
They became a net electricity importer (once again the sign of total civilizational collapse to some) and then returned to being a net exporter this year.
But even when importing they had gas and coal capacity they could have used, they just got cleaner energy cheap from other countries to meet their demand.
So why is cheaper energy than gas or coal a problem?
A real problem they have is that their current elected leader hates wind power. If you want to be angry at Germans protesting cheap, clean energy I'd start there.
The strategy of using renewable energy when the weather is optimal and fossil fuels when it is not is one that Germany promoted to the point of getting EU to define natural gas as "green". To a degree it does work to make a country that heavily used fossil fuels to reduce consumption, which Germany itself has shown.
If it is cheaper is less clear case. Having all those peaker plants at standby is expensive and require a lot of subsidizes, and there need to be transmission both from the peaker plants and wind farms, which is also paid mostly through subsidies. German subsidies to both fossil fueled power plants and renewable energy producers has only increased by time. The owners of peaker plants can also recover most of losses from periods of optimal weather, not only by subsidies, but also by increasing prices during non-optimal weather as there is very little competition during periods of high demand and low supply.
Not everyone agree with this strategy. EU has no plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the energy grid, despite having a clear plan on phasing out fossil fuels from the transport sector. With the war in Ukraine and war in Iran, the strategy of peaker plants are also looking to be poor in terms of economic and national security.
EU need to issue a full phase out of all fossil fuels in the energy grid by banning any construction of new power plants that burn fossil fuels by 2030 and a final decommission date by 2040. The solution to non-optimal weather has to be done through some other way. The discussion of renewables vs nuclear will then be mostly irrelevant.
The world needs to phase out carbon emissions generally and unreliable suppliers of goods.
We should start with phasing out the mostly costly and harmful emissions first.
Artificial lines drawn between electriciy and other areas are unhelpful.
Once you get below about 500 g per kWh of CO2, which the EU is generally well under, then electrification should be used to offset gas and oil usage in other sectors.
It is fine if you use 1 unit of gas for electricity if you save 9 units elsewhere (roughly accurate figures for home heating with heat pumps in the EU)
And people getting obsessive about nuclear without acknowledging the use of gas peakers and interconnects to balance those grids is just annoying.
Support nuclear by pointing out we can shift cars, trucks, busses, heating and industry to use electricity. A car run on electricity even from the most expensive plants in Europe is cheaper than running on imported fuel.
> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels
This is a myth, you just need to overbuild the renewables like solar, add some storage, and then have _some_ capacity from other sources to handle the dips.
> must be able to maintain equal power generation levels
This is the baseload fallacy. It's not the case now and even less in the future as electricity use coevolves (eg more electricity users move to real time pricing, more storage, strengthened crossborder grid links, etc etc).
I presume crashing your economy isn't too popular of a political decision.
And the balancing thing seems to get fucked up since there's still no proper north south connection in the country and the "easy" grid scale storage options aren't even remotely close to sufficient.
In my country (Belgium) too the prefered option pushed by the greens ended up being....gas plants with 30 year profit guarantees and even then they didn't find much if any takers.
Well the article is saying transformers are overheating. That means the entire distribution network is probably not rated for such high tempratures and god knows how that is going to be solved even if you change the power plant.
Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget/ where would you build?/ where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)?/ contributes little to global energy mix atm/ uranium is limited. Where do you get it from? Etc
This is my favourite objection to nuclear energy. Why wouldn't we just burn the nuclear waste and vent it to the atmosphere? That's acceptable for the fossil fuel industry, so why not for nuclear?
The fact that nuclear energy produces globs of concentrated, easily collected waste is a feature, not a problem. Air pollution from fossil fuels (including radioactive particles) is a leading cause of death worldwide.
Not only that, that nuclear waste is still incredibly energy dense and could be used in the future, if we actually invested more into developing nuclear technologies.
Nuclear waste is a hilariously small amount of mass. It takes decades to build because of permitting and excessive regulations, the current UK plant build being one public insanity after another. Mining uranium is not an issue, it is all over the place and so on.
Every one of your points is a non issue, made into a big deal because of ideology.
Nuclear was built in the 60s and 70s when Europe was still somewhat poor. As countries become decadent standards go up. Folks suddenly have rights and they can afford lawyers. And that house that you want to bulldoze is a half million property.
>> Takes decades to build/ projects run over time and budget
As much as any large scale energy project.
Per kW it is quite effective.
The implication of GP's reasoning is that were Green not yelling about nuclear these would already be built because the projects would have started long ago.
>> where would you store nuclear waste (bonus points for: in your region)
People don't want solar farms, windmills, or oil rigs in their backyard either. Fun fact, coal emits orders of magnitude more toxic waste (including nuclear!) than nuclear itself; it's just stored in the atmosphere.
Also people largely don't want to cook themselves to death because the atmosphere has turned into a literal oven.
Instead they read the news, yap "oh my god 50degC shadowside that is horrible", turn the newspaper page and Gell-Mann-amnesia-forget about it because it's happening at the other side of the world, comfortably sitting on their couch with their HVAC pumping heat outside further contributing to the problem.
>> contributes little to global energy mix atm
Catch-22. Because there's not enough nuclear reactors.
France has a ~ 70% nuclear 10% renewable 10% fossil 10% hydro mix.
> France generates roughly two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear power, well above the global average of just under 10%. This heavy reliance on nuclear energy allows France to have one of the lowest carbon dioxide emissions per unit of electricity in the world at 85 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour, compared to the global average of 438 grams
The problem is enrichment, and it is not even a technical
problem. We're doing more difficult things producing nanometer scale compute wafers by the millions.
Nuclear has drawbacks. I don't think it is the endgame. I'm still waiting for anyone to come up with a less bad solution that actually a) addresses nuclear drawbacks and b) works, because all I see is yelling at nuclear and the proposed alternatives are either unobtainium or nothing at all, both equivalent to the status quo that turns the planet into a death trap.
>Nuclear is not only the energy source most likely to overrun time and cost, it's one of the worst big projects period.
Which is a solvable problem. We didn't have these cost and time overruns in the past to this degree. China and other places don't have them much either.
I presume they don't set up a board of people and file a tower of paperwork when the lightbulbs in the toilet of an unrelated building are due for replacement but no longer produced.
Imagine if people said renewables were unfeasible and pointed at germany's insane expenditure on it to get only part of the easy output done after decades.
There’s an ‘interesting’ dichotomy, echoing the original sentiment:
On the one hand environmental issues from oil and coal are creating an existential pressure that requires mass investment and change as a high public priority.
On the other hand the primary cost drivers of the greenest tech to address oil and gas and industrial process heat usage at scale has paperwork and financing issues that are resolvable by MBAs and some straightforward investment strategies.
Existential threats, paper challenges.
Taken at face value, and considering we have mapped out the physics, these ‘environmentalists’ arguing ad nausea about this online want long term entrenchment of high carbon fuel sources and intimate connections between the global economy and oil despots with no real hope of solving transportation, shipping, aviation, or other major drivers of global energy usage in order to prop up half-solutions for electricity to avoid rational investment or cost-control mechanisms in proven scalable nuclear tech.
Stopping a constant cycle of forced First of a Kind construction, regulatory timebombs unaligned with science, and corporate NIMBY campaigns, is the easiest physics breakthrough humanity will ever have to make. It should be an area of obvious victory, not a show-stopping excuse.
… and, not for nothing, but Oil company PR campaigns a few decades back were explicit: they can’t argue climate change away, they can only confuse the issue, push personal responsibility for national policies, and push half solutions that diffuse actual social opposition. All of this angry knee jerking is following that game plan and the substantial greenwashing propaganda those petroleum giants invested heavily in, to the benefit of rich fossil fuel producers and delay of meaningful changes on our greenhouse emissions.
China has revised down its nuclear build targets and repeatedly had cost and time overruns on nuclear builds, over decades, with different designs. The data just isn't as public.
They've done better recently by building standardised designs repeatedly.
The data is very public for their time spend and verifiably so because they're huge projects and it's quite noticeable when they produce power.
In fact they're one of the main countries pulling the average build time down well below the few notable fuckups in europe recently.
They've also built a number of experimental/new designs and done well.
We did too. And when i read of our fuckups and look at the heaps of nonsensical underlying stories of management and construction in the UK, finland, etc it just seems wild how it can be done like that and be gotten away with.
I've heard of similar in the renewables space (stuff build in contexts/places where it didn't make sense and cost overruns purely for government subsidies) but at least those where individually small fuckups.
Because nuclear energy is only popular in certain circles. No, nuclear waste is not a solved issue. Given Russia was very happily attacking Zaporizhzhia they aren't as safe as you might want to believe. Especially Germany has issues with it due to having stored tons of nuclear waste in old salt mines in barrels that start to leak. Fuck nuclear power.
Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
The fact that Zaporizhia was on the front lines of one of the biggest armed conflicts in recent memory and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Probably it's not in your lifetime or in your area so you don't have to care about it. It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
I am not even categorically against nuclear power, but ignoring the actual risks is just BAD.
> It's literally sweeping something under the carpet..
No, it's sweeping something under solid rock.
> At some point in time there will be a quake strong enough to crack your bedrock or some other natural disaster strong enough to change the status quo. Then you have the disaster.
Lots of places have no seismic activity. Earthquakes don't happen everywhere.
And even if they do, the waste is still buried under 500 meters of rock. Under what scenario does this waste somehow make its way out?
> It baffles me again and again how people can just dismiss these things.
Because risk is relative, and not as you seem to think, absolute and binary.
The risks are being dismissed because they're so tiny, that they're irrelevant. You may as well start planning your life around the assumption you'll win the lottery.
That's why nuclear waste storage is such a common fear mongering tactic, it exploits the human liability of not understanding long-term statistics very well.
Even solar power is more dangerous due to people falling off roofs and such. Same with wind power. And don't get me started on dams. When those fail, people die.
And that's renewables. We're stil mostly burning fossil fuels and dumping the waste products into the atmosphere we all breathe.
Yes, we are literally, as we speak, doing that.
And you're talking about the massive problem of storing some barrels of solid waste.
You're off base in your perception of risk by several orders of magnitude.
First of all I never said these things you claim.
I literally said "ignoring these risks is BAD", not that they are absolutely too great or whatever. That must be evaluated per case.
However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
Yes other things can also be dangerous or deadly. But when a dam breaks people die. What doesn't happen is that the region is unusable for eternity afterwards. So nuclear disasters are a very special case.
> However there are numerous nuclear disasters in recent history that show, that we were not so good at estimating the risk.
The only "recent" one I can think of is Fukushima Daiichi, a little more than fifteen years ago. That one definitely had a couple-dozen injuries at and around the time of the disaster and maybe one death four years later. Compare that to the tens of thousands killed and many thousands injured because of the tsunami and earthquake that damaged the fission plant.
What other ones do you consider to be recent? Do make sure to mention the year in which they happened as well as reasonable guesses at the death and injury numbers for each incident.
(I'll refrain from more than a brief mention of the century+-long ongoing disaster that is fossil-fuel-fired [0] power generation.)
> ...and saw no compromised reactors is testament to their resilience is it not?
It is, yes. As was the performance of the Fukushima [0] reactors after getting hit with seismic forces notably outside their design tolerances... and -well- pretty much every commercially-operated fission power plant ever, other than the known-to-be-very-dangerous-to-everyone-even-at-the-time one the Soviets were running at Chernobyl.
[0] Consider that the destruction of the power plant caused maybe one death years later and definitely caused a couple dozen injuries, whereas the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed that plant killed tens of thousands of people and injured many thousands more.
> Nuclear waste is solved by burying it in bedrock in a location with no groundwater.
But Germany did not do it. They on purpose put it in a salt mine close to the east Germany border and now we have to dig it up again, because ground water is seeping in.
A few weeks ago there were rumors that it's not possible to dig it up and we might have to flood it. It's such a cluster fuck.
German scientist had a list with possible locations for the "endlager" final location. But politicians did not listen and on purpose chose a location not on the list, but one that was close too east Germany to mess with them. They overruled the scientist.
Until we clean it up and find a new endlager I think Germany should not build new nuclear reactor. Just not a good track record. Oh and before that we just dumped it into the north see.
Leakage due to water infiltration. Its about 120.000 barrels stored in "Asse II" that were produced between 1967 and 1978. The contaminated water is reaching ground water which already got positively tested for caesium-137 and plutonium.
>>I know of exactly zero leading politicians that I'd entrust with nuclear waste
I know zero politicians I'd trust with deciding where to build wind farms either, it says more about politicians than the type of energy generation. These kinds of things should be decided following comprehensive research on several locations, which you know - is generally how it's done, example given by OP notwithstanding.
