Is there any rational basis for this that makes any sense? I honestly want to understand the anti-nuclear position but I can't seem to find anything that really is convincing.
It‘s basically fear. The Green Party was founded with the mission to stop nuclear power in Germany. The media repeated their talking points for years and years. It sounds so good and we have dozens of „experts“ who tell us how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is.
As an American, it's so interesting to look at the intra-European differences we normally ignore.
France managed to scale nuclear power with the consent of the population, and it's gone fine, but for some reason countries right next door don't see anything worth learning.
I guess you could say the same about America and Canada, but some of us are accustomed to seeing Europeans as more enlightened than us politically. I suppose people around the world are not that different in the end.
My general understanding is that for France nuclear energy is about securing its sovereignty as a nation. It was the only means to have adequate control over its energy supply to not be held hostage by some other nation.
Another point is that germany is decentralised whereas france is centralised. France can formulate a policy and stick to it, but in germany usually every level of government is involved. And nobody wants to have a nuclear power plants near you. Ignoring local decisions for the greater good is very hard in germany. So I think a there's also naturally a greater pushback in germany than france and then came Chernobyl, which (if I remember correclty) affected germany way more than france. You can still find traces if you analyse wild deer shot from certain areas.
You can also see this in the rail networks, if you ignore that france invested more into it's rail there's also a different philosophy. France not only connected major population centres, it is also quite focused on paris. Exactly as some planners, sitting in paris and planning top-down would devise them. Germany tries to interconnect as much as possible, benefitting as many as possible.
"You can still find traces if you analyse wild deer shot from certain areas."
A bit more than that. Meat from wild boars in saxony and bavaria must be tested, before it can be sold and they do not disclose how much has to be thrown away.
great question! Coal is unfortunately very well connected on every level of the government. For example, the unions are one of the oldest and have very good political connections, especially to the left of the political spectrum and down to the smaller levels. So combined with the corporations they wield a lot of power. I've also seen major players of the political, federal left, meeting with representatives of these unions.
They are the typical union-jobs with large corporations in the background.
Do you think it's a bad idea (I mean policy-wise, separate from politically) to increase retirement age when increasing longevity and low birthrates have shifted the number of workers supporting each retiree so massively? In the US, if I recall correctly, it was once more than 10:1 but now approaching 2:1, and the financial implications of this are massive.
In the end it makes sense, damn the financial mathematics nobody understands, damn our children - let them pay for our round-the-world trips when we reach 62! And when your importance is rated by how much noise you make, it's totally understandable why union leaders pushed against such a logical and long due measure.
When Social Security was founded in 1935, the full retirement age was 65, and life expectency at birth was 60. Immigration was, though not at record levels, high. As a result, there were ~147 working people paying into Social Security for every beneficiary.
These days, full retirement age is 67, but life expectancy at birth is now 76.1 (was 78.8 in 2019 - the rapid decline is a completely separate issue that deserves it's own thread). Net immigration into the US is at record lows. As a result, there are now fewer than 3 people paying into Social Security for every recipient, about 2.6 last time I ran the numbers.
The average (mean) check for SS recipients (OASI) as of Feb 2023 is $1,693.88. I could not find numbers for the median SS check.
The average individual income in the US as of 2020 is $53,383, while the 2020 median income was $34,612.
Of FICA taxes, 6.2% each from the employer and employee goes to Social Security, the other 1.45% each is earmarked for Medicare. This does NOT include ordinary federal income taxes, state income taxes, county or city income taxes, etc.
So there is an effective tax rate of 12.4% feeding Social Security. It virtually all goes to OASI (Old Age Survivorship Insurance - "retirement" Social Security, distinct from DI, Disability Insurance, which costs a teeny tiny fraction of what OASI costs).
12.4% of the mean individual annual income of $53,383, divided by 12 to get a monthly value, gives us $551.62/month in Social Security funding from the mean income.
12.4% of the median individual annual income of $34,612, divided by 12 to get a monthly value, gives us $357.65/month in Social Security funding from the mean income.
So right now, there is about:
2.6 × [$357.65 to $551.62] roughly responsible for funding $1,693.88 per person. Now multiply that deficit by 67 million, the number of people receiving OASI. No prize for spotting the problem here.
Raising taxes probably won't help as much as proponents think it will, especially if you were to only raise them on the "rich" by raising or removing the FICA cap. Individually, it would be a lot more from those wealthy folks in theory, but the mega-rich of the world don't receive ordinary income the way us mere mortals do, and thanks to the 6,000+ page tax code, they often end up paying far less than we do as an effective tax rate on their income.
I see two solutions: scrap the absurdly complex tax code so the wealthy actually pay what they should be paying according to progressive tax rates to buy some time, and use that time to start figuring out how to solve the massive logistical complexity problems of spinning down the largest mathmatically unsustainable pyramid scheme in the history of all of humanity, the OASI component of Social Security. Mathematically, there is no need to disturb the Disability Insurance component of Social Security, which also helps those who have a far greater legitimate need for supplemental income than people who want to retire on the taxpayer's dime.
Nuclear power in France works so fine, they need to shut them down in summer because of cooling-problems. Instead, they buy from Germany, which surprise, has no problems at all in Summer to cover even other countries demand.
Nuclear in France worked very well for decades although it had some hiccups last year. Meanwhile German coal plants are still working despite the considerable installed renewable capacity.
Having so much available renewable electricity that German coal plants would almost shut down for a few days would be a newsworthy event. For France not burning coal is just a regular day (except for last year's hiccups).
The current peak is because of Russia. Coal is used to replace gas, on which they had not much choice. And this peak is supposed to stop in summer. We will see if it will work out. But the phase-out is a long investment and the current plan targets 2038, so it is there. A crucial point is, coal is an important part of some industries, and they have started moving hard to replace it there, so there is a good chance it will work this time. They already tried that 20 years ago, until some corrupt people figured out it's more profitable to move slow, as nobody cared anyway.
No. It's also because they moronically shut down nuclear right after Russia happened instead of keeping it longer. Since they can't replace gas too easily, the coal peak will be longer into the future not just current.
>Coal is used to replace gas
No. Coal is used to generate electricity. Do you know what else they could have used to generate electricity? Nuclear.
The reasoning you provided is just the same ol' anti-nuclear propaganda spewed all over German politics and media: "Oh, it's Russia's fault. We can only use coal. Never nuclear."
No, in the first place it's used to generate heat, which is also used for generating electricity, but also to heat up homes and other systems. Nuclear Plants are simply not in a location where they can serve this purpose.
Yes, it's called district heating or teleheating. And generally is heat also a form of energy used in some other processes, not just for heating up buildings or streets. Energy-politic is far more complex than electricity and building big plants.
Only 0,18% of annual production lost over rivers heating regulation in 2022, when someone talks about that being important in the french nuclear context, I know for sure that this person doesn't know what he is talking about.
That article is from May 2013, last updated somewhere in 2017 and mostly contains graphs up to 2014, with very few exceptions going to 2016.
Which makes me think it fails to paint the whole picture, given the events in the following decade. In all dimensions. Be it nuclear phase out, be it geopolitical changes and instability because of war and broken supply chains, be it coal and climate, or the blow-up of Northstream and switching to LNG, be it extension of wind and solar...
Sorry, but mostly useless pretty pictures, considering all the changes that happened meanwhile.
Interesting point, but seems unlikely to be a root cause of the difference? If anything I would guess the causation goes in the other direction - France was more committed and so did a more thoughtful job setting up nuclear sustainably.
Nope, Nope, Nope. France wanted to have nuclear weapons. Germany wasn't allowed to have them and we mostly didn't want to have them in any case (after WWII at least).
Germany's nuclear infrastructure was just as "sustainable" (and that is a strange word for nuclear industry considering the investments, the mining, etc) as the French one, but smaller and entirely civilian.
...Hrrm... There has been a strange clustering of Leukemia in children near Geesthacht, with much fuss about why that could be, and that it can't be at all related to the NPP Krümmel and adjoining research center there.
There has been a tv-documentary by the ZDF in 2006, titled "Und keiner weiss warum... Leukämietod in der Elbmarsch" a few articles in the mainstream media, and some blogposts then.
From my memory it was all very strange, much hush-hush by the local government, defamation of concerned citizens, and even stranger the burning up of evidence in of all possible places, a fire station involved several times with emergencies there. By random chance...imagine....
Also harassment and hampering of scientists which collected ground samples all over the area, and found no lab willing to examine them in all Germany. So they got it done in Minsk, Belorussia. Funny, isn't it?
What was found there where so called 'spherules', not bigger than one millimeter, hollow ceramic spheres, with (meanwhile?) weakly radioactive matter in them.
Obviously artificial. And unknown. Speculation ensues. Micronukes...
Conspiracy!1!!
Interestingly very similar stuff was also found in Hanau.
Germany doesn't have the capacity to keep anything secret for long. We're a lot worse than the US in that regard, and even they can't keep such things secret.
There were never even rumors anybody wanted a nuclear weapons program. No dark funds. The IAEA is also controlling everything. So yes, any such speculation is ridiculous.
Well, it is dangerous and therefore expensive. Mining Uranium is dirty. Handling the waste is expensive. And handling a big accident is very expensive.
The alternatives are just expensive as well and not without risk either.
So sure, big parts of those fears are definitely irrational. The risks of the invisible dangers of things people do not understand. This is always hard, especially coupled with the fear of a nuclear war. It should probably have been propagated more, that radiation is a very natural thing and without nuclear energy, there likely would be no life on earth, as the earth would be way colder, without fission inside the crust (and core?) warming the earth.
Germany has a lot of brown coal and desire to use it. However, it's not politically trendy. By heavily investing in renewables while closing down nuclear power plants they know they'll have to be relying on coal for decades into the future out of "necessity" and thus they ensure the survival of their brown coal mining business.
Kind of the same how oil companies shill for windmills and solar while telling everyone that nuclear power is very, very dangerous, because they know that windmills and solar aren't a solution and all countries that rely on such tech will be dependent on oil and gas.
Renewables aren't really seen as a threat to fossil fuels, unlike nuclear power.
> In 2021 the remaining (!) 6 power plants produced more electricity than all installed solar capacity.
How does that matter? Solar is not the only source of renewable energy for Germany. 2021, Germany got 42% of its energy from renewable sources, 2022 it already grew to 46%, and 2023 it grows even more. And those numbers are only so "low" because of political reasons and stupid people.
For over a decade the conservative and corrupted sabotaged the progress of renewable energies in Germany. This changed, partly because the government shifted, but to a strong part also because of Russia becoming a problem that not even the corrupted could ignore anymore. The progress since last summer in Germany is incredible, and it won't stop.
I'm not sure what you mean. Solar power has significant shorter emission amortization than 20 years. I think ATM we are at 2-3 years? And solar plants can usually run far longer than 20 years. And still, how does solar relate to nuclear, when solar is not the only solution for replacing nuclear?
Politicians are accountable by voters and voters object to have nuclear waste stored near their homes. Even those who don't think it's a problem and believe the scientists who say "this will never be a problem" (and they don't exactly say that, do they?) know that their property values will suffer.
Putting coal as the alternative to nuclear power is not just a mistake, it's an entirely dishonest argument trying to fool people.
I grew up very close to a coal power plant. Guess what, that is many times more dangerous than storing nuclear waste. I don‘t think I have ever heard anyone say they would rather live close to a coal plant.
Why is it a mistake or dishonest? That is the reality: Germany already powered many coal plants back up to replace gas and nuclear. Now it will take even longer to get rid of coal.
Yeah that‘s because there is a policy not to build one until after exiting nuclear power. Finland did it within a few years. Germany has a very good geology for nuclear waste.
> The site was selected after a long process, which started in 1983 with a screening of the whole Finnish territory.
> The facility is expected to be operational in 2023.
I bet there where not many demonstrations in Finland.
It will take Germany 40 years just to find a site. And then the demonstrations start.
Because the Finns are pragmatic while the Germans are just idiotically idealistic and will protest against any change, even if it's for the greater good.
Also doesn't help that most recent German chancellors form Schroeder to Merkel were in bed with the Kremlin for whom nuclear was a threat to their gas business so spreading anti nuclear propaganda through the media to the gullible German public was a necessary move.
Finland is a small country with a small population. It is futile to compare small countries with large countries. Small countries are much more likely to get lucky in certain regards, for example with a selection of suitable storage sites nobody lives close to. Or with a political climate that is amenable to such things. Also nuclear power was seen as an advantage because Russia is right next door. Finland is just in a much different position than Germany.
We had a nuclear storage site picked out long ago. Then it turned out it wasn't suitable. That's at least as much bad luck as "lack of foresight" or anything else. Finland didn't have that problem. If their storage site turned out to be unsuitable after decades of preparation, maybe they wouldn't continue with nuclear power either.
Last: You accuse others of propaganda but use a phrase like "in bed with the Kremlin" and spout conspiracy theories. You don't understand German politics. Mistakes were made. Presuming malice is convenient and lazy.
> Because the Finns are pragmatic while the Germans are just idiotically idealistic and will protest against any change, even if it's for the greater good.
Exactly, which why nuclear is not the best option for Germany.
Sorry to be blunt and snarky but check your energy bill. You pay twice per kwh what Finns pay while breathing in more coal fine-dust and therefore having a shorter lifespan. Nuff said.
Then learn to read a chart. You are either lying or getting your facts wrong. Less coal plants have been reopened than have been shut down before.
Yes, the plan was to get rid of coal sooner, the Ukraine war made that harder. Actually some more lignite coal got burned last year in order to compensate. But we're going to get rid of those coal plants a lot sooner than if we were to build a couple new nuclear power plants which would commit us to a few more decades of that technology and all the associated problems.
„Um die akute Gaskrise im vergangenen Sommer zu bekämpfen, sind insgesamt 14 Steinkohle-Kraftwerke und ein Mineralöl-Kraftwerk wieder reaktiviert oder entgegen ursprünglicher Pläne nicht stillgelegt worden. Das geht aus einer Übersicht der Bundesnetzagentur hervor. Alle betroffenen Kraftwerke sind nach wie vor am Markt“
Yes, doesn't negate my point. Coal is not the alternative to nuclear power and saying so is a big fat lie, the correlation is just not in the data.
People like you dishonestly want to fool people into believing each terawatt hour not generated by nuclear power is compensated by one terawatt hour generated from coal. Because it's lazy and convenient and some people are stupid enough to believe it.
You are dishonest here. It‘s without a question that we would need far less coal if we still had our remaining 6 nuclear power plants running. We could be pretty much out of coal by now if we would have phased out of coal before nuclear.
Now you are switching around the argument. Of course you could replace coal with nuclear power. But that wasn't what you are lying about. Your lie is that nuclear is getting replaced 1:1 with coal power. Not the same thing.
That was my argument from the very beginning, you are doing a lot of interpretation and talk about lies and dishonesty, which is frankly typical German Energiewende talk that led us into this disaster.
That's just a big fat lie. Even in Germany, the country you malign so much, coal power generation did not increase in the last few years. Not even when transitioning from Russian natural gas.
Yes, I'm slightly wrong on a three-month time period last year. The numbers I had were for complete years...
Still doesn't negate my point that coal is going to be phased out and that coal generation wasn't ramped up as nuclear power was ramped down. There is just no clear relation.
> Note that nuclear plants only contributed to about 5% of all the electrical power in Germany.
And how much of that is coal?
Nuclear power plants provides stable power regardless of weather, wind and climate, and serves as a necessary baseline which can be complimented by renewables.
Eliminating this without having any replacement, any stable baseline power is knowingly making the power-grid and power-supply of your nation unstable. In lack of better words, I would call it malicious.
The fraction that is generated from coal was relatively stable, even declined a little. It only very recently, like end of last year went up a little again - because of the natural gas transition. But that's still a far cry from "nuclear power is replaced by coal".
> Fukujima was essentially the event that made the government speed up the whole plan.
It's wild to me that Fukushima was held up as a reasonable justification to accelerate nuclear decommissioning in Germany. Even ignoring the extent to which the disaster in question could have been mitigated, was anyone expecting a tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?
"was anyone expecting a Tsunami to suddenly manifest over Bavaria?"
No, the thinking or sentiment was, see, even high tech japan cannot securly operate nuclear plants(they know they have earthquakes and tsunamis), so there are surley things we overlooked as well. So nuclear is not totally safe.
And there are a few things, as far as I know. For example the plants were not build taking into account, terrorists crashing a plane into them.
I have it from someone who actually ran finite elements calculations on this very thing, that you can crash a plane on a French plant all you want, it won't leak. You'd need a well placed JDAM, and even then the damage would be quite local, much less than the Chernobyl graphite fire.
one argument that was repeated over and over by pro fission folks was that an accident like chernobyl could not happen in a "good" country like france, german or japan.
seening how one of the most technologicaly advanced countries suffered a contaminating incident that is comparable on scale with chernobyl was a shock to most germans and blew the mentioned agument away.
if you were old enough to remember not being allowed to go outside as a child, to see your playgrounds demolished and the sand exchanged, you may be thinking differently about it.
for decades it wasnt safe to collect mushrooms in the woods, something germans are or better were quite fond of. i am honestly not sure if its even safe today.
nuclear may be safe for the most part but when it goes wrong it goes wrong in such a dramatic way that it is traumatizing.
Fukushima was not Chernobyl: it killed nobody, polluted very little. Much less than a coal plant does in any case, even in terms of radioactive particles put up in the air ..
Fukushima was another reminder that you don't know what you don't know. And with nuclear power, if you don't know something, a whole chunk of your country needs to get evacuated and cleaned up at a stupendous cost.
You are writing something that is not true: in no way can a modern plant cause a large evacuation. Can you explain with an example what you mean? The UNSCEAR has the documentation you need to read in order to graduate from being a green-identity-affirming anti-nuclear commenter into an actual ecologist.
So you count the Fukushima plant as not modern enough, because it caused a large evacuation right? And what counts as modern? Certainly nothing that has ever been built in Germany.
And how fast can we build them? They need to start to come online in the next few years to do anything to stop global warming.
The evacuation was precautionary, killed one person in an accident, only direct loss of life from the Fukushima accident. Not building adequate flood protection and building so close to sea was inane and not something you will find in other sea-shore plants, for example Diablo Canyon in California.
Fukushima was absolutely not a reminder of that. The investigations have shown that not only was Fukushima forseeable, it was in fact foreseen by TEPCO's own risk assessments, but they ignored them.
Well, I didn't know about it and most of the world didn't know about it, and anyone who did know about it didn't do shit about it.
For me that qualifies as unknown unknown. Just a question of perspective. Japanese society, government, maybe even their nuclear regulatory agency (whatever that is) trusted TEPCO to know this shit.
I'm not worried about the exact same thing happening in a German plant. I'm worrying about something else happening WE didn't know or care about. Compare commercial aircraft accidents. Every time a passenger plane crashes, there's a big investigation, lessons are learned and thus safety is improved. Still, crashes happen again and again for new reasons, often not anticipated, sometimes Human error of pilots or other personnel, sometimes of engineers, sometimes other causes. But: At most one plane full of people died. If every time the plane went up in a nuclear mushroom cloud or contaminated a couple square kilometers worth of inhabited real estate, I guess we'd rethink air travel altogether.
Ah yes. And you trust your government to do a perfect job stopping power companies from any such intentional miss-management, especially given such dire consequences? I don't, even though I trust my government quite far.
Because the Japanese government's failure to stop TEPCO from this miss-management is just as bad as any engineering oversight. And Japan isn't a third-world country. Japan runs a tight ship in most regards, tighter than the US and many EU nations. Other countries with a nuclear industry are far more troublesome: Iran, Pakistan, India, Ukraine, Russia, China... But if Japan can fail so spectacularly, all risk estimates around nuclear power are futile.
It is a cultural thing, the green party defined and bound their identity with the anti nuclear movement in the 80s/90s and now they rose to power.
And that movement was strong back then, because chernobyl happened, the clouds came over here and to this day, it is recommended against eating mushrooms from the forest regulary.
Then Fukoshima revitalisied that traumata and in the heat of the moment, the decision was made.
Bullshit. The "Green" party is hovering around 20%, at best. Stop using them as scapegoats for bashing of opinions you don't like.
Nuclear power is very unpopular in Germany. People don't like nuclear infrastructure in their back yards. And it's far from an irrational fear. And yes, there is a part about "We don't want nuclear weapons", so there is one less incentive to stomach the cost and issues and bulldoze over concerns.
At the moment we can have political arguments about keeping one or two online. Don't mistake that for a desire or ability to build new ones...
They are part of the government and they are firmly anti nuclear and use their power. But sure, the base support for nuclear is low people who vote for them. Which is why even the CDU adopted it. Also I don't see, where I was bashing anything.
Sure, the greens have not prolonged the nuclear power plants, but right now this is mostly an economic decision. It's just too expensive for too little gain, to change plans again and again and again. The providers planned with destruction of those plants in mind (after being heavily compensated for shutting them down early).
Planning to shut them down (without adequately speeding up replacements) was a mistake. But it's also a mistake to now decide to keep them (just 3! plants) running
It's only a mistake to shut down the power plants if you assume we want to build lots more plants, nothing goes wrong and perfectly long term storage can be found.
Really, to want nuclear power you need a high risk appetite. You label everyone who doesn't have that appetite as irrational. That's dishonest.
"Really, to want nuclear power you need a high risk appetite."
So there is no risk involved, with betting on fossil fuels and the dictators who sell it? (and the health risk from coal)
And reneawbles are just not there yet, to cover 100% and they still have a long way to go. My personal favourite would have been desertec, but that did not come very far. And there is a big political risk there as well. Morocco is a dictatorship, but stable and the rest is quite instable. Maybe the southern EU countries would get enough sun, to achieve a "desertec" in the EU, but it is a risk as well, to bet on it. Governments change. Opinions change. Prices change. Blackmailing is a thing in politics.
In short, do you have a solution, that is quite riskfree which does not involve coal and does not make us dependant on dictators?
"perfectly long term storage can be found"
And why does it have to be perfect? It has to be good enough, that nothing leaks. Otherwise it can be moved and it could also be recycled.
Yes, long term storage has to be "perfect" in the sense that nothing leaks forever. That's a tall order. It also has to be acceptable to the population. Another tall order.
You are still repeating the lie that fossil fuels are the alternative. Actually, renewable energy is the only way left because nuclear power takes decades to ramp up. Not only do nuclear power plants take years or decades to plan and build according to plan, they almost always go way over time and budget.
Both fossil fuel and renewable have a huge advantage in terms of risk over nuclear power (apart from not nuking populated areas): Nuclear power plants irrevocably commit their society to a couple of decades of risk. Unless you pull the plug early and eat the horrendous cost.
"Yes, long term storage has to be "perfect" in the sense that nothing leaks forever. That's a tall order."
Why "forever"? You are aware of the concept, called half life? It means at some point, the waste will be not dangerous anymore. But yes, that will take some time. But if something happens, like an earthquake that makes a previously safe spot unsafe, you can still move it. (And otherwise you could recycle it to reburn it.)
But of course, you can argue the moving of the waste, is so expensive, because of activists. So then activists can better argue, that nuclear is so expensive. Hurey.
"You are still repeating the lie that fossil fuels are the alternative. "
What exactly is the lie here? I am using electricity right now, that is generated largely by fossil fuels. That is not good in the long term, no - but it is working right now. I think framing things as lying when it is just something you disagree with, is not the best discussion style, but rather sharing agendas.
But asking again directly: what is your proposed idea for riskfree implementation of renewables in germany?
"It also has to be acceptable to the population"
Because this is also a great issue here. Wind turbines face heavy resistance for example. And monocultures of corn are not great either. Offshore wind parks bring their own set of problems (mostly environmental, but also corrosive costs), and sun on its own would require massive storage and massive deployment of panels, which also have to be manufactured, which takes energy.
It is just not so easy.
I am very pro renewables. But I rather have nuclear plants for the transition and as backup, than continue burning coal. But I am open for working alternatives.
Fossil fuels are already getting replaced by renewables, biofuels and economizing energy usage. That's a cold hard fact you people seem to ignore. Technology is getting better. In fact, technology around renewables and energy storage seems to be improving more rapidly than in the nuclear field. 1:1 replacement of nuclear with coal is just a convenient lie you people are repeating so stupid people may believe it.
You don't understand the downsides of nuclear power. It's not even possible to build new plants in time to stop global warming. Even assuming those plants could be build on time and within budget. Which almost never worked, historically.
" It's not even possible to build new plants in time to stop global warming."
Of course that would be possible. It is a matter of investment and prioritizing.
But of course, the biggest problem would be "people like you" (to use your black and white terminology) that would block everything and add extra regulations that do not bring more security, but blockage out of principle.
But like I said, going 100 nuclear would not be my plan. I see them as a transition and backup on the way to 100% renewables.
What would be your plan? If you would have it your way and all the nuclear plants would have to stop tomorrow. How would you replace them? With what?
Can you give a concrete answer here?
And it seems you also want to stop all the coal plants. Great. But how to replace them in reality? Can you share concrete numbers and technologies you would use and not just agenda?
I don't like to have a coal or nuclear plant in the backyard either. But I also don't like blackouts.
There isn't. But existing nuclear-power (where the environmental cost is already paid) isn't perceived "green", even though we can get stable "free" power for years and years and years.
The "Green shift" is fundamentally not scientific, but driven by emotions and buzzwords, and hand-wavey things which can appear to be environmentally friendly or in some cases, just pure environmental accounting cheating/fraud (like moving your emissions to another country instead).
What all professional politicians really care most about though is their own personal reelection, and you can't get reelected without appealing to a wide enough audience. Doing "green" things is their current strategy to appeal to (non-rational perceptions held by) younger demographics.
for example, germany does not have much space for radioactive waste and the people do not want to live near radioactive waste. so politicians can't decide where to put all the waste.
also the performance of nuclear plants are not convincing: if you look to france where many nuclear plants have to shut down because there is not enough water to cool down the plants.
We've spent in excess of 900 euros per MWh this year on fossil sources to back up renewables this last year, Europe-wide, because there IS NO OPTION to sacrifice reliable power - if there is shortfall, society collapses, quickly. There is no even vaguely credible plan to replace those sources. At this point, the European "market" is so stuffed with subsidies out of wholly predictable "temporary necessity" the whole god-damn concept of a "market price" is a lie.
Germany chose coal and gas. They should be held accountable for that.
Nobody claims that we have sufficient renewables right now. If we had more, we would've needed to spend less on fossil fuels this year. You just postulate that fossil fuels can't be replaced. The experts disagree, there are multiple studies that lay out how to do it.
Talk to people involved in the Fukushima cleanup about "externalities" some time.
Nuclear power is only cheap if you ignore that in essence, the whole society is carrying the risk of almost anything that goes wrong. A nuclear power company can't insure any of those risks and certainly can't pay the damages.
Also hidden in those cost estimates is that you need a highly specialized labor force that is hard to ramp up and ramp down, and the field isn't exactly trendy. France is having a huge issue with that right now.
Do you have a reference for the Fukushima cleanup talk? Any documents, interviews?
France chose to switch off some reactors just because one had shown corrosion on a safety tube that is not used in normal operations, has about 0.1% chance of being needed, so all the plants with that tube were shut down just in case. The Chinese are running plants much closer to the metal, have had zero issues...
There are plenty of search engines. Learn to use one some time.
I'm quite worried about China in general. Their inability to regulate various sectors doesn't bode well for their future nuclear safety record. You also wouldn't know anything about Chinese nuclear incidents unless it's absolutely unignoreable.
Then research some more about how "well" it works for France. Germany actually exported quite a lot of energy to France before the transition from nuclear.
France has plenty of problems with nuclear power. The only conclusion is that nuclear power for France only makes sense - barely - because France wants to have nuclear weapons.
You should be more specifix. France is the biggest electricuty exporter of the last decades. They also heat with electricity, not gas. Their Co2 emissions are a fraction of German emissions. What‘s so great about German electricity?
The number of nuclear reactors in operation in the EU peaked in 1989. More than thirty years of decline demonstrate low political, taxpayers and eventually industrial support. There are only so many years you can invest at training and financing without returns.
Only nations with a nuclear deterrent still moderately invest in nuclear power. Industry and society in general moved on.
Nuclear power makes sense in stable peaceful societies where long term planning and maintenance mitigate the risks associated with it.
Europe is perhaps, not currently a stable peaceful place where that makes sense.
In other circumstances I’d be all for nuclear power… but, maybe some solar panels that won’t fuck anything up if the conflict in Ukraine gets out of hand or global warming / ai / banking crisis causes a society collapse isn’t such a bad call in the short term, eh?
Then you don't understand power generation. Especially as long as fossil fuel power generation is still online, any non-fossil fuel power generation, even supposedly unstable, is worth-while because it reduces greenhouse emissions.
The turning point where this changes is quite far off for most countries. You need to replace a lot of fossil fuels with solar/wind to come to that point. And by the time that happens, other solutions will be used, some of which are ready, some of which are not: plant-based fuels, energy storage of various forms and better capacity planning.
But if you were really interested in this topic you should have heard or read that argument a thousand times by now, so I assume you just don't want to listen.
- I don't understand
- I'm not really interested
- I don't want to listen
Sir, your response is not very civilised!
Short term, if you had 10GW of controllable nuclear, you will have to replace it with 10GW of another controllable source. As long as you don't have huge energy storage, replacing reliable and controllable energy source with something not controllable is pure fantasy. In our world this is typically replaced by Gas or Coal. Maybe in a future world we'll have plans to replace one controllable power plant with renewable and storage. BTW I'm mostly speaking about capacity and infrastructure, for sure you are free to not use an infrastructure at its maximum when there is wind or sun but you still need to build it, maintain it, buy and store gas coal or whatever...
Solar/wind is far from ideal, requiring more cement, metal and other materials but also more space than other traditional concentred power sources and by multiple orders of magnitude. You also have to take into account new infrastructures for energy storage.
I'm not writing a wikipedia article. If you want to disprove, feel free to add you own sources and knowledge. I legitimately would be really interested to read how Solar and Wind takes less space, cement and metal than nuclear per WH produced.
You still don't understand that there is a difference between peak capacity and total emissions, right? And that you can replace plenty of total emissions with completely "uncontrollable" energy resources?
Let's say you already have controllable nuclear power and you want to switch while maintaining capacity, best options seems to be either storage + renewable or fossil. Actual production on a given period is an orthogonal problem, we are discussing controllable capacity because you don't want population and industry to suffer and you plan carefully.
Now replacing nuclear capacity, with whatever else, in order to reduce total emissions doesn't make sense, you are doing this for a totally different purpose. Replacing nuclear capacity by investing in new fossil capacity, in order to reduce total emissions, doesn't sound that smart.
These decisions were taken years before the conflict in Ukraine, and German energy policy at the time was largely predicated on Russian imports. Hence, peace and stability in Europe seems to have been an underlying assumption rather than something that was being hedged against.
For me nuclear power plants were already sore points in national security long before the Ukraine war. Terror targets in peacetime, hostages in wartime.
One way to put it: The entire safety record of nuclear power depends on no major war (compared to WWII) being fought around those plants and secondly nobody realizing ill intentions otherwise. There are ways to sabotage nuclear power, and we are betting a LOT on many societies' abilities to prevent or even predict every single one.
The origin of the German discourse about nuclear power is linked to a) nuclear proliferation and b) Chernobyl
The generation born after WWII developed a deep desire to not repeat the slaughter of WWII and many felt that their parents essentially lied to them about their experiences during the Nazi era and their responsibility for it. This mistrust transferred to government policies that would rebuilt the German armed forces, join NATO and by extension come under the "nuclear umbrella" of the US. Nuclear power was seen by many of these people as a bridge technology into nuclear weapons.
Regarding Chernobyl, it might be difficult for Americans to understand how scary and personal that crisis felt for many Germans. I personally can't remember the incident, but our parents shaved our heads and kept us indoors for days and weeks out of fear of potential nuclear fallout. It is comparable to the psychological impact of the COVID-epidemic for many of that generation. My wife is from Eastern Bavaria and forest mushrooms and wild boars over there still have elevated radiation levels and are not recommended to be eaten in many cases.
The phaseout of the last nuclear power plants was essentially decided more than two decades ago under a green-left government. A bit more than ten years ago, a center-liberal government came to power and would have been able to reverse the decision (many politicians in the two parties would have liked to) but Fukushima happened and this became politically untenable. To remove the topic from the political discourse, Angela Merkel pushed through an acceleration of the phaseout schedule.
Today, even the companies running the power plants have lost interest. Re-certification was not done in recent years and would take the remaining power stations offline for months or years, anyway. All of them are many decades old now, beyond their original life span.
So is all of this "rational"? Maybe not in hindsight, but I would argue it was for many people at the time and given that nuclear power never contributed more than roughly 25% to Germanys power production (I think), renewables are growing rapidly and no nuclear power station has been built without massive government subsidies, I personally think that re-entering the nuclear arena does not make any sense for Germany at the moment.
Well the final storage problem for nuclear waste is not solved, and will likely never be solved. Second, nuclear power is not as competitive as everybody thinks without hefty subsidies. And what became important more recently, the Uranium is mostly imported from Russia and former USSR states.
Switching off the nuclear power plants is a concious descision of the German society to go without from nuclear power. The descision is not between nuclear and fossil. The decision is between nuclear, and using less energy (when renewable cannot fill the gap).
I find it surprising that the proponents of nuclear power, who are often free-market libertarians, have so little faith in the market. If we produce less power, prices will go up at first. But only marginally, because it will become more lucrative to build new (renewable) power plants. And energy-intensive industry will be scaled back in times where not much is generated. The economy works basically like a buffered solution. That's why I'm confident, when we turn off the last nuclear plant, nothing will happen.
The plants are old, they must shut down anyway. And it doesn't make much sense to invest in a harmful technology, when you can also invest in something better. Especially if you are already on the way, because you are forced to go down that road.
All plants that are kept in operation have every single component in need of replacement replaced well in advance, so none of the European plants is old in any way a car could be considered old.
> British environmental campaigner George Monbiot last year compared Germany’s nuclear shutdown to Brexit, describing it “as a needless act of self-harm, driven by misinformation and the irrational allocation of blame”.
That says it best. Germany will probably see a dramatic increase in fossil fuel consumption. They will also likely see higher energy prices.
West Germany was looking for a nuclear waste site. I think long to medium term? Not sure. Anyhow, they had like about a dozen potential sites. But then East Germany places a nuclear waste site very close to the border.
Politicians do what they do best, step over the suggestion of the scientist and place all the nuclear waste into Asse II, which is close to the border. Just to fuck with East Germany. No, Asse II was not on the list of potential sites :)))
Now we are combined again with a nuclear waste site smack in the middle of Germany. Groundwater leaks in and we have to dig up the old rusting barrels again.
They have to dig a whole new tunnel just to get to them. It's insane. Oh, and before that we and a few other countries just throw the barrels into the ocean.
This was a long time ago, so you might think we found a new site. No :) NIMBY is strong.
France and Finnland have some decent long term storage.
Combine the bad government track record with that Germany is the birth place of homeopathy and 50% of the population believes in angels. Sprinkle in a bit of Fukushima and Chernobyl. My mother sometimes talks about how she was scared and my sister could not play outside.
No company wants to run the plants, they are very old, expensive and only ever provided 5% of the energy anyway. The population overwhelmingly rejects it (rightfully so) and nobody wants the fuel dumped in their backyard later. And the locations we had planned for that is broken.
1) they are some of the most modern plants on this planet, upgraded very regualary
2)The companies do want to run them, just bot under the imposed conditions and constant exit threat. Preussen Elektra lobbied to keep them running constantly
3)They provided vastly more in the past but got axed piece by piece
4) around 80% currently want to keep them running, especially younger people
5) in other news, no one wants climate change. And no garden was requested as waste storage yet.
1) Most were built in the 70s, the ones still running were all built in 1982. Since then the safety precautions have changed considerably and this cannot be retrofitted. This is also part of the reason why new plants are much more expensive. Has nothing to do with "upgrading".
2) The majority of German companies do not want to return to nuclear: “The phasing out of nuclear energy was decided in 2011 in a political and social consensus and is clearly regulated by law. The use of nuclear energy for electricity production has therefore ended in Germany.”
This decision was made by the conservative Merkel government, not by the green party.
"The dismantling of the power plants, the disposal of radioactive material, the search for a repository - all of this consumes enormous sums of money. German authorities and research institutes are therefore expecting up to 34 cents per kilowatt hour for nuclear power - by far the highest price of all forms of energy."
Germany has the 6th largest coal reserve in the world. It makes (economic) sense for them to protect their natural resource value by extending its relevancy as long as possible.
Just like it makes (economic) sense for Germany to use its ECB role to put struggling economies into debt agreements that, for instance, transfer control of national infrastructure like airports to German corporations.
Of course, in both cases, the superficial reasons given are bright fairytales of benevolence, and the German economic benefits are cast as convenient but coincidental externalities.
What is this magical role that Germany supposedly has in the ECB?
Name the struggling country that was supposedly put in a debt agreement. Is this Greece? Did Greece not _choose_ in a popular vote to remain in the Eurozone? Did they not enter the Eurozone by using fraudulent accounting in the first place? Let us know what Germany then supposedly did exactly during that crisis.
Regarding coal your argument makes zero sense. Either nuclear is cheaper and could cover all needs, then it doesn't matter how much coal there is, it could be left alone. Or it isn't, then there is no need to shut down nuclear to expand coal.
In reality German coal mining has not been economical for decades and has been heavily subsidised to safe some jobs. The German policy is to change everything to renewables and to phase out coal until 2030.
The magical role is that they conveniently provided the ECB, an institution that exists on German soil, with such "independence" that when a real crisis was presented, they were stripped of any actual decision making power and instead the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troika_(European_group) was formed to implement the largest scale changes.
The troika, of course being also conveniently headed by the German chancellor, or "the de facto leader of the European Union (EU)" as her Wikipedia page explains in its introductory description.
This is like saying the EU parliament conveniently is located in Belgium and therefore Belgium controls it.
"The ECB is directly governed by European Union law. Its capital stock, worth €11 billion, is owned by all 27 central banks of the EU member states as shareholders." [0]
The ECB was not strapped of any power, but as a central bank it cannot by itself bailout countries. The Troika was formed to perform this bailout.
I'm not disputing that Germany wields considerable soft power in Europe due to the size of it's economy, but the EU is set up in a way that Germany is a member like the others.
"German taxpayers invested for decades in the development of peripheral European Union members, spent trillions to develop Eastern Germany, and will now pay a good chunk of a third Greek bailout that will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion."
Sorry I'm not going into tangents of tangents while you downvote me for having a different opinion. This topic is about coal in Germany, not about the EU parliament in Belgium.
What you call an "opinion" is baselessly blaming Germany for the debt crisis of Greece.
The topic is not coal, the topic is nuclear. You suddenly started talking about coal, claiming that Germany wants to reduce its own nuclear power plants in order to use more of its own coal. Makes zero sense since the nuclear plants were inside the country, not outside so it doesn't make sense to pretend that Germany is pushing its own product at the expense of someone else. And it is factually wrong, since Germany is also moving aways from coals until 2030.
I'm not downvoting you because I can't even do this, since HN does not permit to downvote replies. But if I could I would have done so since you make wild claims without providing even a shred of evidence or a source.
what changed since Germany extended the life of the reactors to meet their 2030 aspirations, to when they decided to decommission them in spite of their aspirations, in one graphic:
I don't know what you want to say with this graphic.
The only thing I can clearly see in this plot is the Invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
No matter what you want to say, it makes no sense, since both the nuclear plants and the coal plants are owned by German companies. It simply doesn't make sense to argue that Germany is trying to unfairly get an advantage by shutting down one type of it's plants to benefit the other type.
It won't make sense to you. I don't believe you a tiny bit when you say you want to understand it. But yes, there are rational arguments. It is entirely rational not to believe "scientific" risk estimates after a couple too many impossible accidents happened. Estimation risk is real, fat tail risks are a problem, especially with the potential of radioactive fallout. The total projected cost of the Fukushima cleanup is going up year by year btw.
Other rational arguments: The infrastructure is unwieldy and extremely unpopular at best. Germany has no path to solving the nuclear waste issue, partly for political reasons: Nobody wants that (or other parts of nuclear infrastructure, really) in their backyard, and backyards are spaced pretty closely in the old world, and when every citizen has the same voting weight, tough luck. It just doesn't work.
Ukraine is teaching us another point: Nuclear power plants are weak points in the national security, and extremely so in wartime. Even when the enemy shows restraint (Russia strangely does, in that regard) there is an awkward element of hostage taking. Nuclear power is a bet on multiple decades of peace and everything going just right. And if you were really that interested, you could easily find lots more arguments.
As a German you get accustomed to carzy fear-led policies like these.
FYI our „experts“ and think-tanks (DIW, Agora Energiewende, Öko-Ibstitut) are sure renewables are basically free and nuclear is blocking the RE build-up. Plus, nuclear is so dangerous and produces so much waste, it is a non-starter. The only thing they hate more than Co2 is nuclear power, thus we keep runnung brown coal power plants at 1kg/Co2 per kwh.
Coal plants should be gone by 2038. Though the current government coalition is still trying to speed this up to 2030. This seems not entirely feasible though they'll probably get quite far with it. Anyway, some time between 2030 and 2038 most of these plants should be gone. Lignite should be gone sooner than that.
We as germans would like to keep our nuclear powerplants running as long as possible, but the question of how to store the nuclear waste for the little timespan of hundreds of thousand years has not been answered in a satisfying way.
The issue of nuclear waste storage is a complex and difficult one, as nuclear waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and requires specialized storage facilities that are secure and environmentally safe. Despite ongoing research and development into new storage technologies, no country has yet come up with a completely satisfactory solution to this problem.
>as nuclear waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands
Why does the German government and anti-nuclear activists insist on pushing this falsehood? After a few decades most of it will have decayed into low-radioactive isotopes. It will then just be the usual chemically toxic industrial waste.
You’ve been misled and misinformed. The majority of Nuclear “waste” can be reprocessed and reused and the lifespan is not “hundreds of thousands of years.” Ironically the biggest issue ends up being the radioactive reactor components that you end up having to deal with when decommissioning.
While there are lots of fear-driven opponents here in germany, we also know our math - and you can be sure if there was a huge ecological and economical benefit from nuclear power we would build reactors like crazy.
But it turns out that it’s not cheap enough and building and maintaining those plants doesn’t save much greenhouse gases.
If we built them en masse many years ago the numbers could be better maybe. Anyway renewables are our way to go and until we get there we keep the coal so we don’t end up in the middle ages.
They are burning greatly and recently there was supposedly the last village demolished, to get more coal. Also, you can buy coal in the supermarket and use it in your unfiltered stove at home. So not everything is green here, despite a green government.
Although it is sad that Germany has chosen the path of fear, consider that its neighbors are free to step in with additional nuclear power capacity and seem to be doing so. Since the European grid is connected across borders, Germans will continue using nuclear power regardless. It just won’t be provided by plants inside Germany’s borders.
This seems completely irrational and emotionally driven.
If a single person was responsible it would be easier to show this, but one of the perks of a large organization is that no one is responsible for anything.
> This seems completely irrational and emotionally driven
No, not completely.
Even after decades of search and committee, Germany still does not have a long term nuclear waste site. And with a history of the government fucking those up in Germany it's understandable no one wants them. Emotional yes, irrational not.
Germany also left research of future energy technology and research of own weapons.
Basically US must save Germany again and again for another hundreds of years keeping nuclear weapons in Germany.
Also Germany went all-in in buying ship-wise solar panels from China constructing another dependency. Stupid thing is that sun does not shine in the night. Also batteries will be bought container-wise from China.
I don’t know if it was clever decision to replace nuclear with coal. Kinda of back to the 60s.
Just a note ‚ the decision was made around 2011 and now they were faced with getting new fuel rods (decades of use) or running with the legislated phase-out. There isn’t an in between option it seems
A country like Germany could expand its current electricity production by about 50% while simultaneously phasing out nuclear and fossil fuels at a whole sale price for electricity below current market rates and with current technology.
In case of Germany, a 2015 study compared various scenarios for how electricity demand will develop by 2050. The most expansive scenario assumes a yearly demand of 800 TWh, compared to roughly 500 TWh in 2021. [1] The additional demand comes from electrifying cars and heating, etc.
Demand does of course vary by time of day, but is virtually stable from month to month. Variability of renewable production is quite high, so let's assume that you'd need long-term grid-scale electricity buffers for about 30% of yearly demand. The most basic approach to this would be the transformation of electricity and water into Hydrogen when an excess of electricity is available and the reverse when demand outstrips supply. The combined efficiency of that process (electricity->Hydrogen->electricity) is roughly 50%. I'm actually pretty sure that by 2050 we'll have much better solutions available, but this approach is doable with current tech and has the added bonus of being able to be combined with a hydrogen infrastructure similar to how natural gas is currently used, i.e. for industrial processes and heating.
That would put total yearly demand at 1,040 TWh, which based on the efficiency of currently available PV and wind turbines [2] would require a total nominal installed capacity of about 1.040 GW (based on real world data from Germany, 1 GW in installed renewable capacity is roughly equal to a yearly production of 1 TWh. This will vary based on local circumstances, but Germany is not particularly bountiful in its renewable potential compared to other countries).
Currently, Germany has a total installed capacity of solar, wind and water power generation of about 125GW but I will assume that all these installations will reach their end of life before 2050 and will need to be replaced as part of this project.
At current prices for the installation of new PV (700,000 €/MW) and wind onshore/offshore (3,000,000 €/MW) and assuming a 50/50 split in installed capacity, the total investment for the required 1,040 MW would come to roughly 2 Trillion Euros over 30 years, or about 66 Billion Euros per year.
Divided by 800 TWh of yearly demand, this comes out to 8.3 cents (Euro) per KWh. This is comfortably below the 2021 average whole sale price of roughly 10 cents/KWh and in Germany would come out to about 20 cents/KWh for private consumers, compared to the current market average of roughly 30 cents/KWh.
Of course current energy production is quite heavily subsidized by the German government. If subsidies continue (or taxes on electricity are lowered), price per KWh could be reduced substantially.
This is of course only a very rough and simplified calculation. But it is straightforward and based on real world data, a pessimistic energy consumption scenario and current technologies. It ignores the potential for geothermal energy, biomass, imported hydrogen, long-distance imports of solar energy from the Sahara, or hydro power from Northern Europe, as well as likely technological improvement for generating and storing renewable energy. Looking at this, I find it hard to believe that absent a complete revolution of reactor design and cost-effectiveness, nuclear power will have any serious role to play in this, given its regulatory challenges, capital expenditure requirements, construction times and unsolved waste management issues.
if you ask for the logic of this action: There is still no one in the world, who would like to store the remaining nuclear waste which this technology produces.
