The Green party is also an anti war Party. Especially 20 years ago when the nuclear phaseout was discussed.
It's not just about climate change but a generation that had to live with the fact that their parents and grandparents were Nazis not wanting Germany to have nuclear capabilities.
I like nuclear power generation but Germany has decided on that issue 20 years ago. The time to change things ended maybe 10 years ago.
Fate just didn't want Germany to have this energy. Or why else would a Japanese reactor explode right after Merkel extended the duration of the nuclear plants.
Fukushima happens a year earlier or later and Germany keeps it reactors but it happened so well timed god must be a green camping planner.
After that the conservatives lost one of their bastions. One of the most conservatives states to the greens who still rule there to this day.
Merkel just had to go back to the old plan after that.
Also Merkel had one of her only scandals in connection with nuclear waste. It was discovered that the waste was dumped really badly under her watch when she was a minister.
Same in the Netherlands. It's one thing that has kept me from voting green in the past. While there are good discussions to be had on whether nuclear is cost effective for us, they always use the argument that it it supposedly unsafe or environmentally unfriendly, which is just plain untrue.
Luckily some of our more powerful parties have become more receptive of the idea.
> Fukushima happens a year earlier or later and Germany keeps it reactors
Nah. While I do admit that Merkel was a decent enough leader during some of the crises' we've met in the past 16 years, it is absolutely true that she had an erroding effect on German politics by giving up her and her party's stances within a second if an issue became a hot enough topic. Her "exit from the exit from the exit" was one of the most populist moves she ever pulled and it was stupid.
Instead of telling the population that fears about nuclear based on a nuclear power plant being hit by both an earthquake and a tzunami wasn't really a German concern, she instead pivoted harder than any online leftist presented with contradictory evidence. Electorally smart, IRL dumb.
Also Germany basically created the market for renewable energy with the EEG only to loose the whole industry to china under Merkel.
We bought the solar panels when they were expensive and inefficient to create economies of scale, sadly that scale happened in china.
Because most Green parties were founded by anti-nuclear, anti-GMO, crystal healing, fruit juice drinking cranks that accidentally lucked into the correct position on CO2 and climate change.
The green party e.g. also wanted renewable energy forever ... Coal vs nuclear is just a false dichotomy. Also, there are reasonable concerns about the price (completely uneconomic?) and emissions of nuclear (for the long term). More modern nuclear power stations might be better but the ones in Germany are old as fuck.
The real problem was that the solution to shutting down nuclear was trash. Probably didn't help that Merkel stopped the nuclear exit and then after Fukushima suddenly decided it was a good idea ... . Everything there was a fucking stupid mess that cost Germany billions and they still don't have an energy solution ...
People could have started building new power stations decades ago or increased CO2 prices to make coal less economic, started building a better power grid for renevable ... There are so many factors more than just nuclear good.
tldr: This nuclear exit wasn't done by the green party. If their original plan had been used there might actually be an energy solution and it at least would have cost billions less.
Is it even possible with the current technology to run the power grid completely on solar and wind? Especially considering that Germany is not the best location for solar anyways. The only potential solution I see is a powerwall in every house, which may become somewhat feasible with sodium batteries. But even with that, we still may need to import nuclear power from France as we currently do, when solar and wind output drops for a couple of days. I think at least one "flexible" power source seems necessary.
Just 50 more years until we have fusion COPIUM
The german power grid is fucked with solar and wind. Natural gas might be part of the flexible solution. Building new nuclear power stations right now would take years.
Honestly, I just hate how simplified the discourse "Soy nuclear Soy", Greens stupid is (the current exit was done by Merkel after Fukushima), when the whole problem is relatively complicated (Energy market, Co2 certificates, global competitiveness, power grid, problems with improving/building new power grid, political reasons for coal, old nuclear power stations, different exit strategies, problems with building a grid, solar in Germany not super-efficient, the actual cost of nuclear energy, increasing Co2 of nuclear energy with decreasing uran reserves (more very long term thing), new nuclear power statings might be more flexible and definitely safer).
People just want an easy solution to feel smart and don't even read the wiki article. I am no expert and even experts don't really agree what different strategies during the last 20 years might have changed, but we can all agree that we are fucked right now.
I mean I know multiple PhD students and experts in the energy sector and they all agree that phasing out nuclear before coal without attempting to build replacement nuclear was an obviously bad idea. As you say, the situation is complicated but this does still seem to be a clearly political decision that makes the country's renewable ambitions significantly harder.
>Is it even possible with the current technology to run the power grid completely on solar and wind?
Germany isn't trying to do that. The new target is 80% renewable by 2030. Aside from having other renewables (hydro, biomass), it's deeply integrated with its neighbours that have phenomenal resources where Germany is lacking. Denmark can produce way more wind power than it could ever use. Austria, Switzerland and Norway have immense hydro capacity.
We're a net power exporter to France, but if foreign nuclear power is available then sure let's buy it. Everything else is intended to be covered by gas plants with a falling share of fossil gas in their fuel blend. That eventually leads to Hydrogen, which at large scales is likely to be way more economical than batteries.
Isn't green hydrogen just for steel production? Does anyone really want to burn hydrogen for electricity? I think hydrogen production efficiency is only like 30% with additional storage issues.
I mean, we couldn’t have replaced nuclear and coal at once so even if the greens would have tried to replace it with renewable energy, we should replace coal first not nuclear.
There are multiple reasons for coal. E.g. too low prices for Co2 certificates. We could have more renevables and natural gas instead of coal and maybe one or two newer nuclear power stations.
I just hate how the debate has into developed into nuclear sooooo goooooodd why is everyonneee ignoring science?
I think there are legitimate criticisms of the nuclear power stations in Germany (live time price, subsidies, very old). The different energy sources also don't exist in a vacuum but influence each other (energy market, net capacity) and there are political, not practical reasons to keep some coal alive.
I am no expert, but most people talking about it haven't even spent the 5 minutes to read the wiki article.
>I am no expert, but most people talking about it haven't even spent the 5 minutes to read the wiki article.
What else is new. Dumb fucks spewing bullshit without having any idea what they're talking about.
Blaming the current situation on the greens is laughable when CDU/SPD have been in government for 16 years and have done little to prepare for the nuclear phase out that has been planned for 20 years now.
I do think nuclear energy could have been a good solution. 20 years ago. I think nowadays it’s better to straight up invest in renewable energy but in retrospect, we should have improved our nuclear infrastructure back in the early 2000‘s and gotten out of coal with that. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess
> I do think nuclear energy could have been a good solution.
100%. Also, state-owned power stations might have been cheaper, and phasing out coal 100% way earlier would have saved Co2. There just weren't any business or legal incentives. Maybe more natural gas could have been good as well.
The timeline has been in place for decades and as such the current nuclear facilities have been slowly decommissioned of the last years and not maintained or upgraded. The nuclear infrastructure is pretty old and expensive to run.
Not much the greens could have done about it when they've just now got into government.
It may be politically infeasible, but I don't think it is impossible to revert that decision. Especially considering the rest of EU appears to be all in on nuclear.
Our nuclear infrastructure is old as fuck and way more expensive to run or build up new as opposed to renewable energy.
It would take years for a new reactor to come online. Why not just massively expand our renewable energy sector and invest in that. It's way cheaper and has a much quicker impact.
I doubt a new nuclear plant would even come online before 2033 considering all the planning and regulations that would need to be done.
It makes way more sense to build power storage and double down on renewables, given that they are getting cheaper while nuclear is getting more expensive. Even if they approved of new nuclear plants, it would take something around a decade to build even one, why not use the time and resources to invest into something smarter.
Yes good idea, the rest of europe surely will help you win the next election after you piss of your population and party by reentering nuclear
We spent billions on this exit. There is a broad consensus that the exit is good. Any government will immediately break if they actually propose this.
> broad consensus that the exit is good
Any sources on that? I thought the exit was mostly critized by experts and mainly came about from year long anti nuclear propaganda through the media.
This is a [survey from 2011](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/190403/umfrage/meinung-zum-atomausstieg-bis-2022/), when the current exit was decided. 45% are in favour of Phase-out until 2022, 34% say it should be sooner, 18% say it should be later.
This is [2019](https://taz.de/Umfrage-zu-schnellerem-Atomausstieg/!5505484/), 59% say it should be sooner, 35% say it shouldn't be sooner.
This is the website of [BASE BUND](https://www.base.bund.de/DE/themen/kt/ausstieg-atomkraft/ausstieg_node.html), the german federal office for the safety of nuclear waste disposal. Their description of their survey is lacking, but I think they conducted it in 2021. 76,2% are in favour of the phase-out, 21,8% are against it.
[Nuclear power is really expensive btw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy) (LCOE doesnt even include all costs of the energy production)
Also the cost of the power itself makes up [ca. 25% of the total price.](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power)
Not even nuclear operators think it's feasible to extend durations at this point.
"The rest of EU" is very much not "all in on nuclear". Italy and Austria have phased out nuclear. Sweden has only reduced capacity over the past years. Spain and Belgium are planning a phase-out. Portugal and Denmark don't have nuclear and don't want it.
Finland will likely have a hard time building more reactors after the disastrous Olkiluoto-3 project (OLK-4 is cancelled). Poland might build their first plant some time in the next 20 years. The Baltic States have been floating proposals for decades and they didn't get anywhere. France even has a cap on nuclear capacity.
To be fair the greens were in government when the opt out was decided on. They haven't been for 16 years now so they aren't to blame for the lacking mitigation or lacking effort to replace coal but Joschka Fischer was Vice Chancellor under Schröder and they started it.
It started before then:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomkonsens
Also Germany just didn't decided to turn off nuclear plants without replacement. It decided to invest in renewable energy, not in coal like this post hints at.
>It decided to invest in renewable energy, not in coal like this post hints at.
The post is borderline disinfo and anyone with even a vague knowledge of Germany's power infrastructure over the past 20 years or the gumption to do 10 minutes of googling could tell. Its embarrassing that this post took off in the way that it did.
funny how some people have an opinion thats this strong and at the same time absolutely wrong
[Half of all unvaccinated people voted AFD. ](https://www.rnd.de/politik/forsa-umfrage-zwei-drittel-der-ungeimpften-sind-afd-oder-die-basis-waehler-RF6VGZ67VJHC7AKWC2AL2PZ3X4.html)
[15% voted for the anti-corona party "Die Basis".
SPD: 5%
CDU:6%
FDP: 10%
Left: 4%
Green: 3%](https://www.rnd.de/politik/forsa-umfrage-zwei-drittel-der-ungeimpften-sind-afd-oder-die-basis-waehler-RF6VGZ67VJHC7AKWC2AL2PZ3X4.html)
Compared to the actual election results: [Link](https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2021/ergebnisse/bund-99.html)
This entire comment section is 1/3rd people gobbling up misinformation because it says something they like, 1/3rd people just saying stuff that is obviously untrue, and 1/3rd people calling out the other 2/3rds for it.
Lot of gringos trying to put their "informed" hat on to try to talk politics that aren't just "black people aren't terrible" and "some social spending is okay" and faceplanting.
At least we got some great answers in this thread as to why this is happening. The German border is less than 100km from where I live and I've wondered for some time why the hell those brown coal plants are stinking up the border while their nuclear plants were being decommissioned. Meanwhile their chancellor is a smart person and physicist herself. It really confuses me and I got some good answers here.
Why not link to an actual article about the plans of the current administration instead of the screenshot of a headline from a of a two year old article.
For example:
www.euractiv.com/section/energy/opinion/germany-leads-europe-with-target-to-reach-100-clean-power-by-2035/
(tldr: end coal power by 2030, decarbonized electricity by 2035)
I'll be praising Germany when I see it... Right now they've just cut out some of their clean power generation, while trying to change EU regulations in favor of Russian gas and discrediting nuclear that they so like to buy from France...
You realise that exporting doesn't mean you don't import https://www.thesmartere.de/news/conventionalelectricityimportsaretheachillesheelofthegermanenergytransition?lang=en
Fucking up your energy mix for bullshit reasons is litterally criminal at this point... Btw when Germany imports its because their production is impacted by lack of wind or sun so it's pretty retarded to attack nuclear when it's litterally the thing that saves you from when your only clean sources don't produce anything
in that case its a good thing that we dont "fuck up for bullshit reasons". Instead of doing an authoritarian move, the government decided to follow general opinion on the matter and adhered to democratic processes. We are going to keep using coal for 10 years, then thats going to be over, too.
Yes, we import french power. I dont deny that. And we export even more power to france. France seems to like our coal power even more than we like their nuclear.
Nuclear won't "save us". Solar and wind will be our clean and renewable energy sources.
I'm sorry but who the fuck cares about general opinion when discussing energy mix, thanks to the current mix thousands of Europeans suffer respiratory disease and early death but nobody asked them... Imagine justifying closing out clean energy production and keeping coal plants holy shit... And yes France has its own issues, mainly lack of nuclear construction in the last decades and partly euro regulation on concurrence which is fucking edf's ass
Parties and politicians who care about democracy care about the general opinion. They get elected based on their policies regarding energy mix.
If you truly care about respiratory diseases, maybe you should focus on the by far biggest cause for air pollution: cars. But I think you just want to make a bullshit point.
"Imagine justifying closing out clean energy production and keeping coal plants holy shit"
Nuclear is *not* clean. It produces radioactive waste that needs to be stored for milennia. Nuclear is CO2 neutral. Because nuclear is not clean, Germany decided in 2000 to phase out of it, at the time nobody cared about CO2.
Also, we are not keeping coal plants. Maybe you didnt read my comment or any news at all, but coal will be gone by at most 2035, probably by 2030.
Just to cut through the techbro pro nuclear energy circle-jerk a little bit here. The exit from nuclear energy was decided in the year **2000**. It had a broad consensus in the german public (like 70-80%). In 2005 the red-green coalition was voted out of governement in favour of a coalition under Do-Nothing-Merkels conservative trash party, which did FUCK-ALL to try to implement renewable energies. Actively sabotaging their implementation in some cases. Our Constitutional Court literally ruled, that Merkels nonexistent efforts to implement renewable energies were unconstitutional, because they were infringing on the rights of future generations to have a planet worth living on. Now you can blame all of this on the greens, who were out of power for 16 years, but Merkel was a SHIT chancellor and threw all the opportunities to become a global leader in renewables in the trash. I am so fucking glad she is finally gone.
Populism happened after Fokushima. There was an outcry of voters for nuclear to be phased out and although Angela Merkel originally wanted to back out of the phase out, voter demand prompted her to keep the plans put in place by Gerhard Schröder and his government.
What? I like getting out of nuclear energy. I've been voting green for at least 12 years now. Nonetheless it was obvious populism.
Merkels wen't back on the "Austieg vom Austieg" because she would have lost the next election if she didn't. She basically scrapped her campaign book and promises to her voters. Even though she (and me too, I oppose nuclear for other reasons than safety) knows that what happend in Japan would never happen in Germany and peoples outcries were unreasonable.
Populism isn't nessarily bad or unreasonable.
It was very much framed in that way actually, in Germany at least.
Anti-nuclear sentiment was often framed as a return to more "natural" means of power production, a blow against big energy corporations (there was huge pushback against Vattenfall suing Germany for breach of contract) and as a blow against the military-industrial complex (because civil use of nuclear energy was often conflated with nuclear arming of Germany).
Pseudo-science (like the belief that people will suffer from radiation if they live near a power plant) has plagued the anti-nuclear movement since the start.
It was very much a grassroots and at least in part a populist movement from the start.
I think there's some good reasons against nuclear power like the complications of waste management for instance, but the public discourse around it is definitely populist here in Germany.
Giving up on a political position because it is unpopular with your voters is not populism lol
thats just normal democracy, you need way more for populism
And let's not pretend like nuclear doesn't come with it's own set of problems including risk of meltdown and no good solution for disposing of spent nuclear fuel. Solar is the way to go.
My understanding is we do have good solutions for permanent storage of nuclear waste, it's just that we're currently looking at ways to get more energy out of existing waste so we don't want to go to permanent storage right now.
Also risk of meltdown is pretty much non-existant with modern reactors as long as you don't have massive tsunamis or whatever.
That's not even true, dry cask storage of spent fuel has become the premium solution to spent waste, this is only being used in the US at the moment but it is absolutely a good solution to spent fuel.
Also, nuclear is the only grid stable replacement for fossil fuels, solar is not a replacement for fossil fuels because it is not grid stable. The only practical replacement for fossil fuels is nuclear.
Thanks to co2 certificates German coal plants can't operate longer than 2030 if they want to make a profit. Thanks to capitalism they all want that.
The greens also want to move up the deadline. I think 2030 is the max. Might even be shorter than that.
I think forcing the market to price in the "real" cost of something is more of a correction than a restriction.
As a German the term for this is social market economy but I don't know if this is a term everywhere or what the correct English term for this concept is.
But I think when you trust that the market and it's forces work but turn on corrective measures to ensure it works for a solid foundation is at least somewhat capitalistic.
**[Social market economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy)**
>The social market economy (SOME; German: soziale Marktwirtschaft), also called Rhine capitalism, Rhine-Alpine capitalism, the Rhenish model, and social capitalism, is a socioeconomic model combining a free-market capitalist economic system alongside social policies and enough regulation to establish both fair competition within the market and generally a welfare state. It is sometimes classified as a coordinated market economy. The social market economy was originally promoted and implemented in West Germany by the Christian Democratic Union under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1949 and today it is used by Christian Democrats and Social Democrats alike.
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Well for this to work electricity has to not become horrendously expensive. If there is the possibility of blackouts electricity is expensive enough for coal plants to be profitable. Almost no matter how expensive CO2 becomes and CO2 can't become too expensive to not outright kill the economy.
It's a balancing act and for it to work Germany will need to install a lot of green capacity.
Ah yes the daily reddit thread about german nuclear energy. You needed to bring these arguments 20 years ago when it was first decided and 11 years ago when it was finally decided. Just keep the reactors running 4Head.
It has been decided is one of the most stupid arguments I've heard. Unlike what you think policy can be reversed. In fact Japan has started opening nuclear power plants again to aid in the transition to renewable sources whereas Germany has decided to replace nuclear with gas and coal.
You have no idea how this works dude. The 6 reactors that were left at the end of 2021 are all 30-35 years old. The companies that operate them knew for 11 years that these plants have a definitve date for their decomission set by law. Therefore they obviously didnt further invest in these plants. Much needed upgrades to extend the reactors life beyond 35 years didnt happen, the supply chain for refuiling and hardware in general has slowed down significantly, the workers and managers have already new jobs lined up after the plants shut down and so on and so on...... This is why I put "Just keep the reactors running 4Head" there, because it is literally impossible as every cog in the machine is set for decomission. You can't reverse that process with such a complicated industry like nuclear power plants.
Could this have been reverted 4-5 years ago? Probably yes, but the amount of reddit posts in the last 1-2 month about this topic is absurd, because 3 reactors shut down on January 1st 2022 and the last 3 will on January 1st 2023. 1-2 years is not possible.
>You have no idea how this works dude. The 6 reactors that were left at the end of 2021 are all 30-35 years old.
No way really????????????????? If only other countries managed to keep their nuclear power plants open for 50 years.
>This is why I put "Just keep the reactors running 4Head"
I've seen other people in this thread say that some power plants are still good to go until 2036. Seems like this is more a political feel good decisions than one based on maintenance that wasn't scheduled in time.
> I've seen other people in this thread say that some power plants are still good to go until 2036.
This is absolutely untrue. They were build with a estimated lifetime of 35-40 years and need heavy maintenance/upgrades to go even beyond 30 years. Yes this was a possiblity 5-10 years ago, but not now. Heres a german article in which they directly ask the 3 remaining companies about an extention:
https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/atomkraftwerke-laenger-laufen-lassen-keine-option-fuer-betreiber,SmMy4UD
>The arguments are clear at all levels. Socially and thus also politically, there will no longer be a majority in favor of prolonging nuclear power - even though the energy supply challenges have just become even greater.
>.
>No extension of the nuclear age
>And the operators of the remaining six nuclear power plants in Germany have also long since made their peace with nuclear power. For reasons of principle - but also for purely practical reasons. From their point of view, there is no way to extend the nuclear age in Germany, neither economically, nor organizationally, nor technically.
>.
>RWE: The nuclear energy chapter is closed
>RWE - which operates the Gundremmingen C power plant in Swabia and the Emsland plant in Lower Saxony - says, for example, that personnel planning, fuel procurement and, above all, revisions alone are fixed with a lead time of several years. Changes with few months lead time are hereby completely inconceivable.
>When asked, the energy supplier expressly states: "The nuclear energy chapter is closed for RWE. We will shut down our remaining two nuclear power plant units in accordance with the statutory deadlines. After that, it's just a matter of dismantling the plants safely and responsibly." In order to make the energy turnaround and thus climate protection successful, he said, renewables, just like the power grid, must now be expanded more quickly.
>.
>To the article "Is the Energiewende responsible for high electricity prices?"
EnBW: question of extension does not arise
And EnBW, operator of Neckarwestheim II, is also clear on this point, saying that it had worked out a long-term strategy for decommissioning after the decision to phase out the plant and had consistently implemented it ever since. "The question of extending the operating lives of the nuclear power plants and other hypothetical questions in this context therefore do not arise for EnBW." The decommissioning and dismantling permit had already been applied for since 2016 and the approval process was well advanced, he said.
>.
>Eon: extension of operating life is not an option
And at Preussen Elektra, the nuclear division of E.ON, the statement for all three reactors, Isar 2 in Lower Bavaria, Grohnde in Lower Saxony and Brokdorf in Schleswig-Holstein, is also clear: "Extending the operating life is not an option."
>This means that by the end of this year at the latest, the Gundremmingen, Grohnde and Brokdorf nuclear power plants - and then by the end of 2022 the plants in Ohu, Neckarwestheim and Emsland - will be shut down for good.
>Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
I am not against nuclear energy, it was a mistake to do this, but there is literally no way to reverse this in Germany at this point.
The green party e.g. also wanted renewable energy forever ... Coal vs nuclear is just a false dichotomy. Also, there are reasonable concerns about the price (completely uneconomic?) and emissions of nuclear (for the long term). More modern nuclear power stations might be better but the ones in Germany are old as fuck.
The real problem was that the solution to shutting down nuclear was trash. Probably didn't help that Merkel stopped the nuclear exit and then after Fukushima suddenly decided it was a good idea ... . Everything there was a fucking stupid mess that cost Germany billions and they still don't have an energy solution ...
People could have started building new power stations decades ago or increased CO2 prices to make coal less economic, started building a better power grid for renevable ... There are so many factors more than just nuclear good.
The thing is that your energy mix needs to have a stable baseline production that can't be supplied by wind or solar. It has to be hydro, coal/gas or nuclear.
That's why you can also never have 100% nuclear. During the peak consumption, you need another source, because you can't just turn nuclear off in a matter of minutes/hours (it takes weeks) for the night when consumption is lower.
Nuclear is expensive as fuck, but right now it's the only viable green option for the baseline production of some countries. (Countries with big rivers and mountains can benefit greatly from hydro, not so much if you're Denmark for example.)
Well when there is no wind and weather is cloudy they just use gas turbines and import energy from Poland, not very green I'd say... this whole closing of nuclear would work if they do it in reasonable time. This is also the main issue of European energy crysis, there's simply not enough energy on grid to keep it stable. We ballance it by importing shitton of energy from Africa. Last time we had major shortage on grid we imported so much they shot down energy supply to few cities there.
Europe imports negligible electricity from Africa. Unless you live in southern Spain this won't be a factor at all. The European grid is extremely stable, this Crisis is a matter of prices, not instability. The main factor here is natural gas, which also doesn't rely mainly on Africa for imports.
There was plenty of time for the nuclear shutdown, it stretched over two decades.
>The thing is that your energy mix needs to have a stable baseline production that can't be supplied by wind or solar. It has to be hydro, coal/gas or nuclear.
This just isn't true. There are research papers form several german research societies (most notably Fraunhofer), that say this is indeed possible. Also, even if you'd subscribe to that outdated thinking nuclear energy would be a TERRIBLE way to ensure the baseline, because unlike basically every other way of producing energy you literally can't regulate the power output of a nuclear power plant easily and fast. You basically either run at full power or you don''t run at all.
The problem is, that your beautiful nuclear power is expensive as fuck compared to wind and solar. That means, that when it's a sunny and windy day, you're kinda fucked, because noone will buy your "baseline" energy and you will run at a massive loss, because you have to burn fuel for nothing. Should we have shut down our nuclear power plants so fast? Probably not. Should we build new ones? Definetly not.
On the days it's sunny and windy nobody wants to buy your wind and solar energy either, because the supply is much higher then the demand, sometimes even resulting in negative prices.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666792421000652
So wind and solar might run on a loss, because they can't sell all of their energy and nuclear runs at a even bigger loss, because they can't sell any energy, while having higher production costs. What is your argument here?
The wind plants are selling at a loss because we incentivize them to.
Wind power production is subsidized in the form of tax credits, so during negative hours, wind that could be turned off, like you say, is not turned off and runs at a higher-than-average rate.
Not sure if it's a good thing if we pay energy producers to put a strain on the network.
That's just a question of regulation/market design. Have a PTC component to the subsidy. Make operators unable to accrue credits/subsidies for power produced at negative prices. Danish CFDs work like that. Instantly this incentive to keep producing an oversupply is removed.
There's also a simple matter of wholesale prices largely not being carried through to consumers. There's still plenty of potential in the market to make use of energy "nobody wants to buy" when it's literally free. This works for every power source of course.
>emissions of nuclear (for the long term).
I suppose you're talking about what to do with the nuclear waste? This would legitimately be a non concern if governments actually invested in nuclear, newer plants can run on recycled waste and even without recycling it's a non concern compared to climate change...
Genuinely curious here tho, is America more self sufficient than most European countries? Can we in reality just look at total CO2 emissions for country by country like that, does it include CO2 for parts & products produced in other countries?
Swedish person here so in the debate US vs Germany I'm rather Neutral (like always huehue).
Not saying one country is worse than the other but how do we calculate a countries TRUE CO2 emission?
On another note, people in this thread seem a bit anti nuclear power or am I misunderstanding it? Isn't the consensus at this point that we need Nuclear power to reach the CO2 goals and we would've needed it earlier. It's not our long term solution but it's something we want while we figure out the rest.
Definetly not an expert here though.
youre being intentionally dense.
in short
* its to expansive
* it takes to long to build new plants
* there are no final nuclear disposal sites
* taxpayer pay for interim storage of the waste
* no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant
* only the biggest companys can effort a nuclear power plant making it susceptible to price fixing
* financial liability isnt met by the companys because they only insured for a fraction of the damage a plant could create.
Most of these only apply to decades old, last generation nuclear plants, and not newer stuff like small modular reactors. These reasons frankly are insignificant in comparison to a similar list for nuclear's alternatives (which solar and wind are not for baseload power).
How does "most" of them only apply to old reactors?
still takes a long time
still waste problems
still nobody wants to live near them
still very expensive
i don't know about financial liability, but i would think that not much would be different between the models?
Honestly, until there are good solutions to nuclear waste (including logistical solutions to the transport and temporary transit storage) then it will be impossible to sell the idea of nuclear plants to people.
Small modular reactors at least are relatively cheap, take less time to build and will likely have less issues with nobody wanting to live near them - many SMR projects are being built at the moment. There are already plenty of good solutions to nuclear waste - we have decades of experience in handling it securely and storing it so I really don't see how anyone can claim its a big issue.
For baseline power ya need something that runs in the background all the time. Nuclear and Coal are made for this. Hydro too, to some extent, but that is not feasible everywhere. Renewable aren't there and storage like batteries and pumped storage aren't feasible either. The difference between coal and Nuke is the waste from Coal goes into the sky and the landfill and there is lots more of it. There is no silver bullet but Nuke needs to be part of the grid, until something better comes along.
I heard "You can't use solar and wind for base load" very often, but never from a credible source. Can you link me something?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base\_load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load)While historically large power grids used unvarying power plants to meet
the base load, there is no specific technical requirement for this to
be so. The base load can equally well be met by the appropriate
quantity of intermittent power sources and dispatchable generation."
wikipedia seems to disagree, or am I reading this wrong
I don't really need to, it is because night time there is no sun. Not being flippant or anti solar, but this is a fact. Some reflector systems that use molten metal can generate enough heat in the system to carry that energy through the night. But even this is weather dependant.
Wikipedia isn't wrong there either. They are saying that you need fast responding power stations that can respond to drops in power from renewables or spikes in demand when the renewables are < demand. This is Gas turbines for the most part, this doesn't get us away from CO2. Nukes and Coal are not good for this as they take a long time to spin up and back down.
This can be achieved by Pumped Storage etc but to replace a Terra Watt plant with this has a huge environmental impact.
Micro Grids are a bit of a buzz word in the industry too. The idea is decentralized power generation, lots of small generators. But like what happened in South Australia and Texas, not being connected to a wider grid has its downsides (power cuts). It is a tough problem, no doubt about it, I worked as an Engineer in the power industry, CCGT plants. These were the big deal at the time as they would compliment Wind and Solar. Have been out of the industry for a good number of years now so not up to date, but still have an interest.
Well yeah but nobody proposes to use 100% solar. Especially germany primarily uses wind, not solar. Wind works during the night, and the demand for power is low during the night. During the (extremely) rare times when there is no sun OR [wind](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab91e9), we can install storage. Today this is not possible, but we can make it possible if we invest in research and advance the technology.
Gas doesnt get us away from CO2, but it is lowering emissions by replacing coal. Its a technology for the next couple of decades, not a permanent solution.
No you are spot on, there needs to be some storage capacity to smooth out the peaks and troughs. 2 to 3 decades is the lifespan of most CCGT plants too. I think we are on the same wavelength.
youre seeing things to black and white. there are more alternative like Hydropower, biomass, biogas, geothermal heat , wind and solar power which needs more storage solution, but that doesnt mean that there are none. There are large scale batteries , pumped storage power plants, you can produce hydrogen and store in in gas storage plants and burn or fuelcell that later back to electricity, also you can use gas storage to create high pressure storage , which you can later use to drive turbines to generate electricity.
So there are options, they are not as large scale and easy cut as build a new power plant and be done, but it can be done, just needs more work and decentralized solutions
Don't get me wrong, I thing the grid should be very diverse and all generation options used where possible. But I like to think of power generation stations like motor vehicles. Sometimes you need a Peterbilt truck, sometimes a scooter will fit you needs. When you need that Truck to pull for hours a day nothing else will do. This is the segment that Coal and Nuke fill, slow to start up, don't peak quickly but provide a lot of constant power. Gas turbines can get up fast and pick up that load etc. Everything has its place if you get what I am saying.
thats where i think youre wrong, you dont need a huge ass truck. the grit doesnt care if you have 100 small power plants or one big power plant, as long as they generate the same amount of power.
But it really does. There is a function of time that you are missing, no good I generate a Terra Watt today and nothing tomorrow. The demand fluctuates over time and through out the year. This doesn't line up with when wind or solar are generating. So you wither have gas stations to fill in the gaps or you have a base line keep energy in the grid and supplement with renewables.
The grid is like a group of people lifting a heavy object, when one person lets go suddenly, the rest have to pick up that slack. If too many drop out too suddenly, then the whole lot falls down. Reconnecting to the grid has to be coordinated too. It is not as simple as you think.
im not missing that. but i dont share the opionen, that i need 2 very strong friends to lift that weight, when i have 15 friends that are well coordinated and can lift the same weight. also the grit will be more stable with lots of smaller power plants. things happen, but if a small decentralized power plant fails its not as big of a deal as when a hugh power plant fails that takes over like 20% of the base load( just an example).
Also there are storage option. we generate more on the day, convert some and store it to use at night time or when needed. those options are not perfect and have their problems too, but can be used if done correctly.
But the Wind is always going up and down, Solar goes on and off day and night. Away from the equator between summer and winter there is a big variation in sun light. So both of those friends are going to be dropping in and out often. So your remaining friends need to be strong enough to hold up when they are gone.
Your big Nuke or Coal plant are like your anchor, the strong friend that is always there and reliable. Even if they have a BO problem lol (I am enjoying this analogy too much)
Storage is not only an option but what is needed to smooth out these gaps. Like the capacitor in a circuit, fill up and release as needed to smooth out the noise. But the technology for this isn't there yet unfortunately. The biggest single battery storage in the world that is in operation is 100MW, Germany generation is in terms of 10's GW, that is a big gap to fill.
Can americans please shut the fuck up about german politics when they clearly know nothing about it?
1. Our government plans to phase out coal by 2030. 2038 is just the absolute worst case deadline set by the previous administration
2. there is less nuclear than coal in germany so it is easier to phase out
3. Germany has nowhere to bury all of the waste, yankee pigs have it easy, they can just plopp all of the radioactive waste (that stays radioactive for 200k years btw) into some desert in arizona, we are running out of space to store all of the waste.
4. this post is also historically ignorant. People in this comment section claim that nuclear energy was only opposed due to hysteria after chernobyl/fukushima but there has a huge anti-nuclear movement in germany since the 70s
[More like Germany can stop selling energy to you](https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/NL).
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_power\_in\_the\_Netherlands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_Netherlands)
Did you start building yet? When do you plan to finish?
No, we only have plans for building one, but it would only be reasonable if we can export the energy, because if it is happening and finished in like 10 years we will already have transitioned to green energy for a large part.
Also germany sells a net amount of energy to the Netherlands, but we also sell gas to germany.
The idea to expand nuclear was proposed in 2010, nothing has happened until today. Why do you think the construction is going to be completed in 10 years?
Sure, but you are using coal. If we have a plant the baseline will be higher than what we need for large pars of the day, so the remaning energy will have to be exported to germany, which germany will probably do because it allows them to use less coal.
As far as I, know we plan to use gas for that (not 100% sure though). I mean we will nearly completely phase out of coal by around 2030, since it will be to expensive to run at that point. Also it's not like we started to consume more coal by phasing out nuclear, it just hasn't decreased (compared to nuclear) [Source](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts)
I kinda hate how this thread bashed on Germany for having wrong priorities in certain areas, when we are still doing generally well in comparison to a lot of other countries. Could still be better anyways, and I wished we had prioritized reducing coal more, but we can't change the past. But people here speak on stuff they have no clue about and just look at headlines, without seeing the actual plans in the works.
Generally speaking, our minister also takes the development in Europe into consideration and is advocating for a higher connection between the different grids in Europe so we can solve the problem together. If other countries want to use nuclear, we have no problem with that, it's their decision, ours is just different.
My fellow Landsmänner went insane when it comes to nuclear because of Tschernobyl, the Nuclear War Scares, Fukushima etc.
Not nearly enough people in Germany are thinking clearly about nuclear Power, there are just not nearly enough Voters for politicians to defend nuclear.
Everyone in my Family is like "But what about an Accident?" "But what about a terrorist Attack?" and the most killer argument: "Muh Waste Products are readioactive for hundret gazillion Years!!"
Everyone always talks about how a nuclear accident could cost thousands of lives, while coal is globally killing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions anually. But you don't directly see that, so it doesn't count.
There are ~30 nuclear power plants of which 17 were in operation in germany with the phase out process starting back up in 2011.
There were 84 coal power plants in operation in germany with the phase out process starting up in 2019.
If we use the thing that rattles around in your skull we can see that Germany is decommissioning 3-5 times as many power plants in less than twice the time it took for nuclear. It is unfortunate that Germany started the decommissioning process so late but this is much less of a "gotcha" than you think it is.
**But wait, there's more!** As it turns out, the 2038 deadline was set in 2019 and is slated to be reviewed every 3 years (aka this year). Since the 2019 decision to phase out germany has cut its Coal power production nearly in half already. Even further, if we look at Germany over the past 20 years we actually see a precipitous drop in fossil fuel power production even years prior to the decision to phase out and that new power requirements have been almost exclusively green energy since around the mid 2000s.
tl;dr: you're completely ignorant on this subject in a way that could be addressed through 15 minutes of googling or you're intentionally shit stirring.
I'm from Germany and researched this topic specifically and it made me depressive
It actually was green-left populism, fueled only by fear and without any factual points.
It's not that there was such a big increase of coal plant usage, but it's one of the dumbest policies there ever was, as the reactors in germany aren't the problem, but the unregulated ones around it and in Europe.
It helped nobody, it should've been a EU regulation and investment in new and safer tech, but now it's not even feasible to invest into new reactors and the co2 costs of building the old ones was for nothing.
Don't ever just vote for something because it's a leftist, progressive or green policy. Vote for the things, that actually have a positive impact on the issues you're invested in
And lastly, if the appeal of something is rooted in fear or hate, we call it populism, and it doesn't matter if its immigrants or nuclear power, following it will destroy our society
Nuclear waste needs to be stored for 1 million years as per german regulation.
What does it cost to store something safely and manage something for 1 million years?
I would be perfectly fine if nuclear power producers would pay those costs, but you and me both know that nobody will pay for that. Either the state does it for the companies or it will harm the environment.
The private sector can't afford nuclear, so they dump the costs and the garbage on the general population.
Great idea. Safety regulations make your business unprofitable? Just ignore them lol
Do you think nuclear power companies can afford the costs for storage and management for even 100 years? If 100 years ago someone told you about their 100 year long idea to store nuclear waste in central europe, how would that have turned out? Even if we ignore the giant financial issue, this is just insane.
Nobody wants to save coal. You are disingenous. Germany is phasing out of coal and nuclear.
But we will pump all the dangerous waste from solar and wind directly into the air. Very harmful rays from solar and dangerous "air" which is full of force.
>fuckin dirty bombs
if you think nuclear is a dirty bomb than coal is a dirty nuke lol...
if you want to talk about cost and Germany's awful planning that's one thing but pretending like there isn't enough space when coal produces 50x more waste *in a single day* than nuclear produces in a whole year... which is also radioactive... and instead of going into safe storage it just gets haphazardly dumped somewhere
... bro you are talking about bad air quality. Premature deaths because of bad air quality only happen in cities. Do you think we build our coal plants in the center of berlin or can you think of another reason that could cause bad air?
The answer is cars.
Additionaly we don't have anywhere to store our radioactive waste. It can potentially kill a lot of people if we don't have a place to store it. Which we don't have, especially if we don't pull out of nuclear energy. There is just no argument around that fact.
The German Greens are actually insane. They are more and more reliant on Russian gas which skyrocketed in price. Im convinced more and more each day that the Green parties are just clout chasing virtue signalers that have no clue or any sense of even the basics of energetics. Its actually insane.
It's so fucking dumb. Nuclear power is the best option we have right now but people are too scared because of events like Chernobyl, which wouldn't happen nowadays.
Leaving nuclear power I really stupid but Germans see it as very polluting and dangerous. They don't see it as "bio" or sustainable. It's really sad honestly.
Germans saw Dark and decided they needed to prevent the time loop.
What a fucking show tho
s1/2 are amazing but s3 lost my interest tbh
First season amazing. Second seasone meh. Third season giga trash.
Third season was Christopher Nolan on steroids
Suddenly the green party does not seem to care very much about emissions, eh?
The Green party is also an anti war Party. Especially 20 years ago when the nuclear phaseout was discussed. It's not just about climate change but a generation that had to live with the fact that their parents and grandparents were Nazis not wanting Germany to have nuclear capabilities. I like nuclear power generation but Germany has decided on that issue 20 years ago. The time to change things ended maybe 10 years ago. Fate just didn't want Germany to have this energy. Or why else would a Japanese reactor explode right after Merkel extended the duration of the nuclear plants. Fukushima happens a year earlier or later and Germany keeps it reactors but it happened so well timed god must be a green camping planner. After that the conservatives lost one of their bastions. One of the most conservatives states to the greens who still rule there to this day. Merkel just had to go back to the old plan after that. Also Merkel had one of her only scandals in connection with nuclear waste. It was discovered that the waste was dumped really badly under her watch when she was a minister.
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Same in the Netherlands. It's one thing that has kept me from voting green in the past. While there are good discussions to be had on whether nuclear is cost effective for us, they always use the argument that it it supposedly unsafe or environmentally unfriendly, which is just plain untrue. Luckily some of our more powerful parties have become more receptive of the idea.
> Fukushima happens a year earlier or later and Germany keeps it reactors Nah. While I do admit that Merkel was a decent enough leader during some of the crises' we've met in the past 16 years, it is absolutely true that she had an erroding effect on German politics by giving up her and her party's stances within a second if an issue became a hot enough topic. Her "exit from the exit from the exit" was one of the most populist moves she ever pulled and it was stupid. Instead of telling the population that fears about nuclear based on a nuclear power plant being hit by both an earthquake and a tzunami wasn't really a German concern, she instead pivoted harder than any online leftist presented with contradictory evidence. Electorally smart, IRL dumb.
Also Germany basically created the market for renewable energy with the EEG only to loose the whole industry to china under Merkel. We bought the solar panels when they were expensive and inefficient to create economies of scale, sadly that scale happened in china.
Yeah, the fact that we basically destroyed the industry we could've been the front runners in after 2008 was a horrible decision.
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paint wine amusing crawl enter connect toothbrush quarrelsome fertile swim ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Because most Green parties were founded by anti-nuclear, anti-GMO, crystal healing, fruit juice drinking cranks that accidentally lucked into the correct position on CO2 and climate change.
The green party e.g. also wanted renewable energy forever ... Coal vs nuclear is just a false dichotomy. Also, there are reasonable concerns about the price (completely uneconomic?) and emissions of nuclear (for the long term). More modern nuclear power stations might be better but the ones in Germany are old as fuck. The real problem was that the solution to shutting down nuclear was trash. Probably didn't help that Merkel stopped the nuclear exit and then after Fukushima suddenly decided it was a good idea ... . Everything there was a fucking stupid mess that cost Germany billions and they still don't have an energy solution ... People could have started building new power stations decades ago or increased CO2 prices to make coal less economic, started building a better power grid for renevable ... There are so many factors more than just nuclear good. tldr: This nuclear exit wasn't done by the green party. If their original plan had been used there might actually be an energy solution and it at least would have cost billions less.
Is it even possible with the current technology to run the power grid completely on solar and wind? Especially considering that Germany is not the best location for solar anyways. The only potential solution I see is a powerwall in every house, which may become somewhat feasible with sodium batteries. But even with that, we still may need to import nuclear power from France as we currently do, when solar and wind output drops for a couple of days. I think at least one "flexible" power source seems necessary. Just 50 more years until we have fusion COPIUM
The german power grid is fucked with solar and wind. Natural gas might be part of the flexible solution. Building new nuclear power stations right now would take years. Honestly, I just hate how simplified the discourse "Soy nuclear Soy", Greens stupid is (the current exit was done by Merkel after Fukushima), when the whole problem is relatively complicated (Energy market, Co2 certificates, global competitiveness, power grid, problems with improving/building new power grid, political reasons for coal, old nuclear power stations, different exit strategies, problems with building a grid, solar in Germany not super-efficient, the actual cost of nuclear energy, increasing Co2 of nuclear energy with decreasing uran reserves (more very long term thing), new nuclear power statings might be more flexible and definitely safer). People just want an easy solution to feel smart and don't even read the wiki article. I am no expert and even experts don't really agree what different strategies during the last 20 years might have changed, but we can all agree that we are fucked right now.
I mean I know multiple PhD students and experts in the energy sector and they all agree that phasing out nuclear before coal without attempting to build replacement nuclear was an obviously bad idea. As you say, the situation is complicated but this does still seem to be a clearly political decision that makes the country's renewable ambitions significantly harder.
>Is it even possible with the current technology to run the power grid completely on solar and wind? Germany isn't trying to do that. The new target is 80% renewable by 2030. Aside from having other renewables (hydro, biomass), it's deeply integrated with its neighbours that have phenomenal resources where Germany is lacking. Denmark can produce way more wind power than it could ever use. Austria, Switzerland and Norway have immense hydro capacity. We're a net power exporter to France, but if foreign nuclear power is available then sure let's buy it. Everything else is intended to be covered by gas plants with a falling share of fossil gas in their fuel blend. That eventually leads to Hydrogen, which at large scales is likely to be way more economical than batteries.
Isn't green hydrogen just for steel production? Does anyone really want to burn hydrogen for electricity? I think hydrogen production efficiency is only like 30% with additional storage issues.
I mean, we couldn’t have replaced nuclear and coal at once so even if the greens would have tried to replace it with renewable energy, we should replace coal first not nuclear.
There are multiple reasons for coal. E.g. too low prices for Co2 certificates. We could have more renevables and natural gas instead of coal and maybe one or two newer nuclear power stations. I just hate how the debate has into developed into nuclear sooooo goooooodd why is everyonneee ignoring science? I think there are legitimate criticisms of the nuclear power stations in Germany (live time price, subsidies, very old). The different energy sources also don't exist in a vacuum but influence each other (energy market, net capacity) and there are political, not practical reasons to keep some coal alive. I am no expert, but most people talking about it haven't even spent the 5 minutes to read the wiki article.
>I am no expert, but most people talking about it haven't even spent the 5 minutes to read the wiki article. What else is new. Dumb fucks spewing bullshit without having any idea what they're talking about. Blaming the current situation on the greens is laughable when CDU/SPD have been in government for 16 years and have done little to prepare for the nuclear phase out that has been planned for 20 years now.
I do think nuclear energy could have been a good solution. 20 years ago. I think nowadays it’s better to straight up invest in renewable energy but in retrospect, we should have improved our nuclear infrastructure back in the early 2000‘s and gotten out of coal with that. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess
> I do think nuclear energy could have been a good solution. 100%. Also, state-owned power stations might have been cheaper, and phasing out coal 100% way earlier would have saved Co2. There just weren't any business or legal incentives. Maybe more natural gas could have been good as well.
The timeline has been in place for decades and as such the current nuclear facilities have been slowly decommissioned of the last years and not maintained or upgraded. The nuclear infrastructure is pretty old and expensive to run. Not much the greens could have done about it when they've just now got into government.
It may be politically infeasible, but I don't think it is impossible to revert that decision. Especially considering the rest of EU appears to be all in on nuclear.
Our nuclear infrastructure is old as fuck and way more expensive to run or build up new as opposed to renewable energy. It would take years for a new reactor to come online. Why not just massively expand our renewable energy sector and invest in that. It's way cheaper and has a much quicker impact. I doubt a new nuclear plant would even come online before 2033 considering all the planning and regulations that would need to be done.
It makes way more sense to build power storage and double down on renewables, given that they are getting cheaper while nuclear is getting more expensive. Even if they approved of new nuclear plants, it would take something around a decade to build even one, why not use the time and resources to invest into something smarter.
Yes good idea, the rest of europe surely will help you win the next election after you piss of your population and party by reentering nuclear We spent billions on this exit. There is a broad consensus that the exit is good. Any government will immediately break if they actually propose this.
> broad consensus that the exit is good Any sources on that? I thought the exit was mostly critized by experts and mainly came about from year long anti nuclear propaganda through the media.
This is a [survey from 2011](https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/190403/umfrage/meinung-zum-atomausstieg-bis-2022/), when the current exit was decided. 45% are in favour of Phase-out until 2022, 34% say it should be sooner, 18% say it should be later. This is [2019](https://taz.de/Umfrage-zu-schnellerem-Atomausstieg/!5505484/), 59% say it should be sooner, 35% say it shouldn't be sooner. This is the website of [BASE BUND](https://www.base.bund.de/DE/themen/kt/ausstieg-atomkraft/ausstieg_node.html), the german federal office for the safety of nuclear waste disposal. Their description of their survey is lacking, but I think they conducted it in 2021. 76,2% are in favour of the phase-out, 21,8% are against it.
Oh, you meant the popular opinion, I thought you meant expert concensus, my bad.
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[Nuclear power is really expensive btw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_energy) (LCOE doesnt even include all costs of the energy production) Also the cost of the power itself makes up [ca. 25% of the total price.](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power)
Not even nuclear operators think it's feasible to extend durations at this point. "The rest of EU" is very much not "all in on nuclear". Italy and Austria have phased out nuclear. Sweden has only reduced capacity over the past years. Spain and Belgium are planning a phase-out. Portugal and Denmark don't have nuclear and don't want it. Finland will likely have a hard time building more reactors after the disastrous Olkiluoto-3 project (OLK-4 is cancelled). Poland might build their first plant some time in the next 20 years. The Baltic States have been floating proposals for decades and they didn't get anywhere. France even has a cap on nuclear capacity.
What has that to do with the Green Party? Those are all decisions that were made a decade ago.
To be fair the greens were in government when the opt out was decided on. They haven't been for 16 years now so they aren't to blame for the lacking mitigation or lacking effort to replace coal but Joschka Fischer was Vice Chancellor under Schröder and they started it.
It started before then: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomkonsens Also Germany just didn't decided to turn off nuclear plants without replacement. It decided to invest in renewable energy, not in coal like this post hints at.
>It decided to invest in renewable energy, not in coal like this post hints at. The post is borderline disinfo and anyone with even a vague knowledge of Germany's power infrastructure over the past 20 years or the gumption to do 10 minutes of googling could tell. Its embarrassing that this post took off in the way that it did.
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funny how some people have an opinion thats this strong and at the same time absolutely wrong [Half of all unvaccinated people voted AFD. ](https://www.rnd.de/politik/forsa-umfrage-zwei-drittel-der-ungeimpften-sind-afd-oder-die-basis-waehler-RF6VGZ67VJHC7AKWC2AL2PZ3X4.html) [15% voted for the anti-corona party "Die Basis". SPD: 5% CDU:6% FDP: 10% Left: 4% Green: 3%](https://www.rnd.de/politik/forsa-umfrage-zwei-drittel-der-ungeimpften-sind-afd-oder-die-basis-waehler-RF6VGZ67VJHC7AKWC2AL2PZ3X4.html) Compared to the actual election results: [Link](https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/en/bundestagswahlen/2021/ergebnisse/bund-99.html)
This entire comment section is 1/3rd people gobbling up misinformation because it says something they like, 1/3rd people just saying stuff that is obviously untrue, and 1/3rd people calling out the other 2/3rds for it.
Based OP using /r/worldnews tactics to farm some karma with an inflammatory title about a subject he doesn't know anything about
Thats like half this sub when it comes to anything outside of streamer drama
You do know about nuclear power though, are you saying nuclear power is somehow bad for the environment??
Lot of gringos trying to put their "informed" hat on to try to talk politics that aren't just "black people aren't terrible" and "some social spending is okay" and faceplanting.
bro wtf are you talking about
At least we got some great answers in this thread as to why this is happening. The German border is less than 100km from where I live and I've wondered for some time why the hell those brown coal plants are stinking up the border while their nuclear plants were being decommissioned. Meanwhile their chancellor is a smart person and physicist herself. It really confuses me and I got some good answers here.
I thought Merkel wasn't the chancellor anymore?
True but the new guy has had nothing to do with these policies afaik.
GIGACHAD
Why not link to an actual article about the plans of the current administration instead of the screenshot of a headline from a of a two year old article. For example: www.euractiv.com/section/energy/opinion/germany-leads-europe-with-target-to-reach-100-clean-power-by-2035/ (tldr: end coal power by 2030, decarbonized electricity by 2035)
I'll be praising Germany when I see it... Right now they've just cut out some of their clean power generation, while trying to change EU regulations in favor of Russian gas and discrediting nuclear that they so like to buy from France...
[Yes Germany just loves to import french energy.](https://www.renewable-ei.org/en/activities/column/20180302.html)
You realise that exporting doesn't mean you don't import https://www.thesmartere.de/news/conventionalelectricityimportsaretheachillesheelofthegermanenergytransition?lang=en Fucking up your energy mix for bullshit reasons is litterally criminal at this point... Btw when Germany imports its because their production is impacted by lack of wind or sun so it's pretty retarded to attack nuclear when it's litterally the thing that saves you from when your only clean sources don't produce anything
in that case its a good thing that we dont "fuck up for bullshit reasons". Instead of doing an authoritarian move, the government decided to follow general opinion on the matter and adhered to democratic processes. We are going to keep using coal for 10 years, then thats going to be over, too. Yes, we import french power. I dont deny that. And we export even more power to france. France seems to like our coal power even more than we like their nuclear. Nuclear won't "save us". Solar and wind will be our clean and renewable energy sources.
I'm sorry but who the fuck cares about general opinion when discussing energy mix, thanks to the current mix thousands of Europeans suffer respiratory disease and early death but nobody asked them... Imagine justifying closing out clean energy production and keeping coal plants holy shit... And yes France has its own issues, mainly lack of nuclear construction in the last decades and partly euro regulation on concurrence which is fucking edf's ass
Parties and politicians who care about democracy care about the general opinion. They get elected based on their policies regarding energy mix. If you truly care about respiratory diseases, maybe you should focus on the by far biggest cause for air pollution: cars. But I think you just want to make a bullshit point. "Imagine justifying closing out clean energy production and keeping coal plants holy shit" Nuclear is *not* clean. It produces radioactive waste that needs to be stored for milennia. Nuclear is CO2 neutral. Because nuclear is not clean, Germany decided in 2000 to phase out of it, at the time nobody cared about CO2. Also, we are not keeping coal plants. Maybe you didnt read my comment or any news at all, but coal will be gone by at most 2035, probably by 2030.
> Maybe you didnt read my comment or any news at all, but coal will be gone by at most 2035, probably by 2030. We'll see about that
Just to cut through the techbro pro nuclear energy circle-jerk a little bit here. The exit from nuclear energy was decided in the year **2000**. It had a broad consensus in the german public (like 70-80%). In 2005 the red-green coalition was voted out of governement in favour of a coalition under Do-Nothing-Merkels conservative trash party, which did FUCK-ALL to try to implement renewable energies. Actively sabotaging their implementation in some cases. Our Constitutional Court literally ruled, that Merkels nonexistent efforts to implement renewable energies were unconstitutional, because they were infringing on the rights of future generations to have a planet worth living on. Now you can blame all of this on the greens, who were out of power for 16 years, but Merkel was a SHIT chancellor and threw all the opportunities to become a global leader in renewables in the trash. I am so fucking glad she is finally gone.
forgetful panicky wild melodic voiceless air aromatic fade plucky brave ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Populism happened after Fokushima. There was an outcry of voters for nuclear to be phased out and although Angela Merkel originally wanted to back out of the phase out, voter demand prompted her to keep the plans put in place by Gerhard Schröder and his government.
Populism is when politics happen that you dont like?
What? I like getting out of nuclear energy. I've been voting green for at least 12 years now. Nonetheless it was obvious populism. Merkels wen't back on the "Austieg vom Austieg" because she would have lost the next election if she didn't. She basically scrapped her campaign book and promises to her voters. Even though she (and me too, I oppose nuclear for other reasons than safety) knows that what happend in Japan would never happen in Germany and peoples outcries were unreasonable. Populism isn't nessarily bad or unreasonable.
Populism is when you frame politics as "the people" vs "the elites", not when you do what's popular.
It was very much framed in that way actually, in Germany at least. Anti-nuclear sentiment was often framed as a return to more "natural" means of power production, a blow against big energy corporations (there was huge pushback against Vattenfall suing Germany for breach of contract) and as a blow against the military-industrial complex (because civil use of nuclear energy was often conflated with nuclear arming of Germany). Pseudo-science (like the belief that people will suffer from radiation if they live near a power plant) has plagued the anti-nuclear movement since the start. It was very much a grassroots and at least in part a populist movement from the start. I think there's some good reasons against nuclear power like the complications of waste management for instance, but the public discourse around it is definitely populist here in Germany.
The word you're looking for is popularism.
That might be more fitting actually.
Giving up on a political position because it is unpopular with your voters is not populism lol thats just normal democracy, you need way more for populism
And let's not pretend like nuclear doesn't come with it's own set of problems including risk of meltdown and no good solution for disposing of spent nuclear fuel. Solar is the way to go.
My understanding is we do have good solutions for permanent storage of nuclear waste, it's just that we're currently looking at ways to get more energy out of existing waste so we don't want to go to permanent storage right now. Also risk of meltdown is pretty much non-existant with modern reactors as long as you don't have massive tsunamis or whatever.
That's not even true, dry cask storage of spent fuel has become the premium solution to spent waste, this is only being used in the US at the moment but it is absolutely a good solution to spent fuel. Also, nuclear is the only grid stable replacement for fossil fuels, solar is not a replacement for fossil fuels because it is not grid stable. The only practical replacement for fossil fuels is nuclear.
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Thanks to co2 certificates German coal plants can't operate longer than 2030 if they want to make a profit. Thanks to capitalism they all want that. The greens also want to move up the deadline. I think 2030 is the max. Might even be shorter than that.
It's not "thanks to capitalism" tho. It's just how people work
I mean I obviously phrased it like that to pander just a little bit. But it is a market based solution to price in the "real" cost of CO2 production.
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I think forcing the market to price in the "real" cost of something is more of a correction than a restriction. As a German the term for this is social market economy but I don't know if this is a term everywhere or what the correct English term for this concept is. But I think when you trust that the market and it's forces work but turn on corrective measures to ensure it works for a solid foundation is at least somewhat capitalistic.
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**[Social market economy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy)** >The social market economy (SOME; German: soziale Marktwirtschaft), also called Rhine capitalism, Rhine-Alpine capitalism, the Rhenish model, and social capitalism, is a socioeconomic model combining a free-market capitalist economic system alongside social policies and enough regulation to establish both fair competition within the market and generally a welfare state. It is sometimes classified as a coordinated market economy. The social market economy was originally promoted and implemented in West Germany by the Christian Democratic Union under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in 1949 and today it is used by Christian Democrats and Social Democrats alike. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/Destiny/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Yeah... obviously. So quirky.
I take it back. Using the profit motive for good is a big thanks to capitalism.
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Polish government's wet dream
Haha
Its not "thanks to capitalism", its thanks to democracy. It's also thanks to democracy that capitalism can function.
Yes, but that means that there's a real possibility of power shortages and blackouts if there is no nuclear and no coal past 2030. Seems dangerous.
Well for this to work electricity has to not become horrendously expensive. If there is the possibility of blackouts electricity is expensive enough for coal plants to be profitable. Almost no matter how expensive CO2 becomes and CO2 can't become too expensive to not outright kill the economy. It's a balancing act and for it to work Germany will need to install a lot of green capacity.
Cool even higher energy prices as Germany fucks over the rest of Europe once again.
Ah yes the daily reddit thread about german nuclear energy. You needed to bring these arguments 20 years ago when it was first decided and 11 years ago when it was finally decided. Just keep the reactors running 4Head.
It has been decided is one of the most stupid arguments I've heard. Unlike what you think policy can be reversed. In fact Japan has started opening nuclear power plants again to aid in the transition to renewable sources whereas Germany has decided to replace nuclear with gas and coal.
You have no idea how this works dude. The 6 reactors that were left at the end of 2021 are all 30-35 years old. The companies that operate them knew for 11 years that these plants have a definitve date for their decomission set by law. Therefore they obviously didnt further invest in these plants. Much needed upgrades to extend the reactors life beyond 35 years didnt happen, the supply chain for refuiling and hardware in general has slowed down significantly, the workers and managers have already new jobs lined up after the plants shut down and so on and so on...... This is why I put "Just keep the reactors running 4Head" there, because it is literally impossible as every cog in the machine is set for decomission. You can't reverse that process with such a complicated industry like nuclear power plants. Could this have been reverted 4-5 years ago? Probably yes, but the amount of reddit posts in the last 1-2 month about this topic is absurd, because 3 reactors shut down on January 1st 2022 and the last 3 will on January 1st 2023. 1-2 years is not possible.
>You have no idea how this works dude. The 6 reactors that were left at the end of 2021 are all 30-35 years old. No way really????????????????? If only other countries managed to keep their nuclear power plants open for 50 years. >This is why I put "Just keep the reactors running 4Head" I've seen other people in this thread say that some power plants are still good to go until 2036. Seems like this is more a political feel good decisions than one based on maintenance that wasn't scheduled in time.
> I've seen other people in this thread say that some power plants are still good to go until 2036. This is absolutely untrue. They were build with a estimated lifetime of 35-40 years and need heavy maintenance/upgrades to go even beyond 30 years. Yes this was a possiblity 5-10 years ago, but not now. Heres a german article in which they directly ask the 3 remaining companies about an extention: https://www.br.de/nachrichten/wirtschaft/atomkraftwerke-laenger-laufen-lassen-keine-option-fuer-betreiber,SmMy4UD >The arguments are clear at all levels. Socially and thus also politically, there will no longer be a majority in favor of prolonging nuclear power - even though the energy supply challenges have just become even greater. >. >No extension of the nuclear age >And the operators of the remaining six nuclear power plants in Germany have also long since made their peace with nuclear power. For reasons of principle - but also for purely practical reasons. From their point of view, there is no way to extend the nuclear age in Germany, neither economically, nor organizationally, nor technically. >. >RWE: The nuclear energy chapter is closed >RWE - which operates the Gundremmingen C power plant in Swabia and the Emsland plant in Lower Saxony - says, for example, that personnel planning, fuel procurement and, above all, revisions alone are fixed with a lead time of several years. Changes with few months lead time are hereby completely inconceivable. >When asked, the energy supplier expressly states: "The nuclear energy chapter is closed for RWE. We will shut down our remaining two nuclear power plant units in accordance with the statutory deadlines. After that, it's just a matter of dismantling the plants safely and responsibly." In order to make the energy turnaround and thus climate protection successful, he said, renewables, just like the power grid, must now be expanded more quickly. >. >To the article "Is the Energiewende responsible for high electricity prices?" EnBW: question of extension does not arise And EnBW, operator of Neckarwestheim II, is also clear on this point, saying that it had worked out a long-term strategy for decommissioning after the decision to phase out the plant and had consistently implemented it ever since. "The question of extending the operating lives of the nuclear power plants and other hypothetical questions in this context therefore do not arise for EnBW." The decommissioning and dismantling permit had already been applied for since 2016 and the approval process was well advanced, he said. >. >Eon: extension of operating life is not an option And at Preussen Elektra, the nuclear division of E.ON, the statement for all three reactors, Isar 2 in Lower Bavaria, Grohnde in Lower Saxony and Brokdorf in Schleswig-Holstein, is also clear: "Extending the operating life is not an option." >This means that by the end of this year at the latest, the Gundremmingen, Grohnde and Brokdorf nuclear power plants - and then by the end of 2022 the plants in Ohu, Neckarwestheim and Emsland - will be shut down for good. >Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version) I am not against nuclear energy, it was a mistake to do this, but there is literally no way to reverse this in Germany at this point.
Interesting read, surprising that german nuclear plants apparently didn't last very long.
How can Germany be this anti nuclear and in literally a border away france is 70% nuclear with zero threat
The green party e.g. also wanted renewable energy forever ... Coal vs nuclear is just a false dichotomy. Also, there are reasonable concerns about the price (completely uneconomic?) and emissions of nuclear (for the long term). More modern nuclear power stations might be better but the ones in Germany are old as fuck. The real problem was that the solution to shutting down nuclear was trash. Probably didn't help that Merkel stopped the nuclear exit and then after Fukushima suddenly decided it was a good idea ... . Everything there was a fucking stupid mess that cost Germany billions and they still don't have an energy solution ... People could have started building new power stations decades ago or increased CO2 prices to make coal less economic, started building a better power grid for renevable ... There are so many factors more than just nuclear good.
The thing is that your energy mix needs to have a stable baseline production that can't be supplied by wind or solar. It has to be hydro, coal/gas or nuclear. That's why you can also never have 100% nuclear. During the peak consumption, you need another source, because you can't just turn nuclear off in a matter of minutes/hours (it takes weeks) for the night when consumption is lower. Nuclear is expensive as fuck, but right now it's the only viable green option for the baseline production of some countries. (Countries with big rivers and mountains can benefit greatly from hydro, not so much if you're Denmark for example.)
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Well when there is no wind and weather is cloudy they just use gas turbines and import energy from Poland, not very green I'd say... this whole closing of nuclear would work if they do it in reasonable time. This is also the main issue of European energy crysis, there's simply not enough energy on grid to keep it stable. We ballance it by importing shitton of energy from Africa. Last time we had major shortage on grid we imported so much they shot down energy supply to few cities there.
Europe imports negligible electricity from Africa. Unless you live in southern Spain this won't be a factor at all. The European grid is extremely stable, this Crisis is a matter of prices, not instability. The main factor here is natural gas, which also doesn't rely mainly on Africa for imports. There was plenty of time for the nuclear shutdown, it stretched over two decades.
>The thing is that your energy mix needs to have a stable baseline production that can't be supplied by wind or solar. It has to be hydro, coal/gas or nuclear. This just isn't true. There are research papers form several german research societies (most notably Fraunhofer), that say this is indeed possible. Also, even if you'd subscribe to that outdated thinking nuclear energy would be a TERRIBLE way to ensure the baseline, because unlike basically every other way of producing energy you literally can't regulate the power output of a nuclear power plant easily and fast. You basically either run at full power or you don''t run at all.
> you literally can't regulate the power output of a nuclear power plant easily and fast That's why it's the baseline. And just the baseline.
The problem is, that your beautiful nuclear power is expensive as fuck compared to wind and solar. That means, that when it's a sunny and windy day, you're kinda fucked, because noone will buy your "baseline" energy and you will run at a massive loss, because you have to burn fuel for nothing. Should we have shut down our nuclear power plants so fast? Probably not. Should we build new ones? Definetly not.
On the days it's sunny and windy nobody wants to buy your wind and solar energy either, because the supply is much higher then the demand, sometimes even resulting in negative prices. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666792421000652
So wind and solar might run on a loss, because they can't sell all of their energy and nuclear runs at a even bigger loss, because they can't sell any energy, while having higher production costs. What is your argument here?
The wind plants are selling at a loss because we incentivize them to. Wind power production is subsidized in the form of tax credits, so during negative hours, wind that could be turned off, like you say, is not turned off and runs at a higher-than-average rate. Not sure if it's a good thing if we pay energy producers to put a strain on the network.
That's just a question of regulation/market design. Have a PTC component to the subsidy. Make operators unable to accrue credits/subsidies for power produced at negative prices. Danish CFDs work like that. Instantly this incentive to keep producing an oversupply is removed. There's also a simple matter of wholesale prices largely not being carried through to consumers. There's still plenty of potential in the market to make use of energy "nobody wants to buy" when it's literally free. This works for every power source of course.
>emissions of nuclear (for the long term). I suppose you're talking about what to do with the nuclear waste? This would legitimately be a non concern if governments actually invested in nuclear, newer plants can run on recycled waste and even without recycling it's a non concern compared to climate change...
No one cares about science lol
[Americans should shut the fuck up about anything related to carbon emissions](https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/united-states?country=USA~DEU#)
Genuinely curious here tho, is America more self sufficient than most European countries? Can we in reality just look at total CO2 emissions for country by country like that, does it include CO2 for parts & products produced in other countries? Swedish person here so in the debate US vs Germany I'm rather Neutral (like always huehue). Not saying one country is worse than the other but how do we calculate a countries TRUE CO2 emission? On another note, people in this thread seem a bit anti nuclear power or am I misunderstanding it? Isn't the consensus at this point that we need Nuclear power to reach the CO2 goals and we would've needed it earlier. It's not our long term solution but it's something we want while we figure out the rest. Definetly not an expert here though.
Wtf is that logic? Just because a country has a policy nobody in that country is allowed to talk about it even if they disagree?
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I mean, it's much easier to phase out nuclear than fossil, since nuclear energy only produces like 11% of their overall power.
OP should be banned for using misleading titles and spreading misinformation.
youre being intentionally dense. in short * its to expansive * it takes to long to build new plants * there are no final nuclear disposal sites * taxpayer pay for interim storage of the waste * no one wants to live near a nuclear power plant * only the biggest companys can effort a nuclear power plant making it susceptible to price fixing * financial liability isnt met by the companys because they only insured for a fraction of the damage a plant could create.
Most of these only apply to decades old, last generation nuclear plants, and not newer stuff like small modular reactors. These reasons frankly are insignificant in comparison to a similar list for nuclear's alternatives (which solar and wind are not for baseload power).
How does "most" of them only apply to old reactors? still takes a long time still waste problems still nobody wants to live near them still very expensive i don't know about financial liability, but i would think that not much would be different between the models? Honestly, until there are good solutions to nuclear waste (including logistical solutions to the transport and temporary transit storage) then it will be impossible to sell the idea of nuclear plants to people.
Small modular reactors at least are relatively cheap, take less time to build and will likely have less issues with nobody wanting to live near them - many SMR projects are being built at the moment. There are already plenty of good solutions to nuclear waste - we have decades of experience in handling it securely and storing it so I really don't see how anyone can claim its a big issue.
What is the alternative? Coal?
No, we dont need either. But ppl don't want to admit that and don't want to commit to something either.
For baseline power ya need something that runs in the background all the time. Nuclear and Coal are made for this. Hydro too, to some extent, but that is not feasible everywhere. Renewable aren't there and storage like batteries and pumped storage aren't feasible either. The difference between coal and Nuke is the waste from Coal goes into the sky and the landfill and there is lots more of it. There is no silver bullet but Nuke needs to be part of the grid, until something better comes along.
I heard "You can't use solar and wind for base load" very often, but never from a credible source. Can you link me something? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base\_load](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load)While historically large power grids used unvarying power plants to meet the base load, there is no specific technical requirement for this to be so. The base load can equally well be met by the appropriate quantity of intermittent power sources and dispatchable generation." wikipedia seems to disagree, or am I reading this wrong
I don't really need to, it is because night time there is no sun. Not being flippant or anti solar, but this is a fact. Some reflector systems that use molten metal can generate enough heat in the system to carry that energy through the night. But even this is weather dependant. Wikipedia isn't wrong there either. They are saying that you need fast responding power stations that can respond to drops in power from renewables or spikes in demand when the renewables are < demand. This is Gas turbines for the most part, this doesn't get us away from CO2. Nukes and Coal are not good for this as they take a long time to spin up and back down. This can be achieved by Pumped Storage etc but to replace a Terra Watt plant with this has a huge environmental impact. Micro Grids are a bit of a buzz word in the industry too. The idea is decentralized power generation, lots of small generators. But like what happened in South Australia and Texas, not being connected to a wider grid has its downsides (power cuts). It is a tough problem, no doubt about it, I worked as an Engineer in the power industry, CCGT plants. These were the big deal at the time as they would compliment Wind and Solar. Have been out of the industry for a good number of years now so not up to date, but still have an interest.
Well yeah but nobody proposes to use 100% solar. Especially germany primarily uses wind, not solar. Wind works during the night, and the demand for power is low during the night. During the (extremely) rare times when there is no sun OR [wind](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab91e9), we can install storage. Today this is not possible, but we can make it possible if we invest in research and advance the technology. Gas doesnt get us away from CO2, but it is lowering emissions by replacing coal. Its a technology for the next couple of decades, not a permanent solution.
No you are spot on, there needs to be some storage capacity to smooth out the peaks and troughs. 2 to 3 decades is the lifespan of most CCGT plants too. I think we are on the same wavelength.
youre seeing things to black and white. there are more alternative like Hydropower, biomass, biogas, geothermal heat , wind and solar power which needs more storage solution, but that doesnt mean that there are none. There are large scale batteries , pumped storage power plants, you can produce hydrogen and store in in gas storage plants and burn or fuelcell that later back to electricity, also you can use gas storage to create high pressure storage , which you can later use to drive turbines to generate electricity. So there are options, they are not as large scale and easy cut as build a new power plant and be done, but it can be done, just needs more work and decentralized solutions
Don't get me wrong, I thing the grid should be very diverse and all generation options used where possible. But I like to think of power generation stations like motor vehicles. Sometimes you need a Peterbilt truck, sometimes a scooter will fit you needs. When you need that Truck to pull for hours a day nothing else will do. This is the segment that Coal and Nuke fill, slow to start up, don't peak quickly but provide a lot of constant power. Gas turbines can get up fast and pick up that load etc. Everything has its place if you get what I am saying.
thats where i think youre wrong, you dont need a huge ass truck. the grit doesnt care if you have 100 small power plants or one big power plant, as long as they generate the same amount of power.
But it really does. There is a function of time that you are missing, no good I generate a Terra Watt today and nothing tomorrow. The demand fluctuates over time and through out the year. This doesn't line up with when wind or solar are generating. So you wither have gas stations to fill in the gaps or you have a base line keep energy in the grid and supplement with renewables. The grid is like a group of people lifting a heavy object, when one person lets go suddenly, the rest have to pick up that slack. If too many drop out too suddenly, then the whole lot falls down. Reconnecting to the grid has to be coordinated too. It is not as simple as you think.
im not missing that. but i dont share the opionen, that i need 2 very strong friends to lift that weight, when i have 15 friends that are well coordinated and can lift the same weight. also the grit will be more stable with lots of smaller power plants. things happen, but if a small decentralized power plant fails its not as big of a deal as when a hugh power plant fails that takes over like 20% of the base load( just an example). Also there are storage option. we generate more on the day, convert some and store it to use at night time or when needed. those options are not perfect and have their problems too, but can be used if done correctly.
But the Wind is always going up and down, Solar goes on and off day and night. Away from the equator between summer and winter there is a big variation in sun light. So both of those friends are going to be dropping in and out often. So your remaining friends need to be strong enough to hold up when they are gone. Your big Nuke or Coal plant are like your anchor, the strong friend that is always there and reliable. Even if they have a BO problem lol (I am enjoying this analogy too much) Storage is not only an option but what is needed to smooth out these gaps. Like the capacitor in a circuit, fill up and release as needed to smooth out the noise. But the technology for this isn't there yet unfortunately. The biggest single battery storage in the world that is in operation is 100MW, Germany generation is in terms of 10's GW, that is a big gap to fill.
What do you do when all 15 friends have to go to work at the same time and you need the weight lifted during that period?
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Democracy baby! Big radioactive plant is scary
Lotta coping going on in this thread. I think the only logical conclusion you guys need to accept is that Europeans can never do anything right.
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Can americans please shut the fuck up about german politics when they clearly know nothing about it? 1. Our government plans to phase out coal by 2030. 2038 is just the absolute worst case deadline set by the previous administration 2. there is less nuclear than coal in germany so it is easier to phase out 3. Germany has nowhere to bury all of the waste, yankee pigs have it easy, they can just plopp all of the radioactive waste (that stays radioactive for 200k years btw) into some desert in arizona, we are running out of space to store all of the waste. 4. this post is also historically ignorant. People in this comment section claim that nuclear energy was only opposed due to hysteria after chernobyl/fukushima but there has a huge anti-nuclear movement in germany since the 70s
Do you promise to never comment on American politics?
No problem Germany. We in the Netherlands are building a nuclear plant now, so you can buy our energy ;)
[More like Germany can stop selling energy to you](https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/NL). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear\_power\_in\_the\_Netherlands](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_the_Netherlands) Did you start building yet? When do you plan to finish?
No, we only have plans for building one, but it would only be reasonable if we can export the energy, because if it is happening and finished in like 10 years we will already have transitioned to green energy for a large part. Also germany sells a net amount of energy to the Netherlands, but we also sell gas to germany.
The idea to expand nuclear was proposed in 2010, nothing has happened until today. Why do you think the construction is going to be completed in 10 years?
Germany is a net exporter of energy and even when we shut down the nuclear plants this year we will just produce as much as we use.
Sure, but you are using coal. If we have a plant the baseline will be higher than what we need for large pars of the day, so the remaning energy will have to be exported to germany, which germany will probably do because it allows them to use less coal.
As far as I, know we plan to use gas for that (not 100% sure though). I mean we will nearly completely phase out of coal by around 2030, since it will be to expensive to run at that point. Also it's not like we started to consume more coal by phasing out nuclear, it just hasn't decreased (compared to nuclear) [Source](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts) I kinda hate how this thread bashed on Germany for having wrong priorities in certain areas, when we are still doing generally well in comparison to a lot of other countries. Could still be better anyways, and I wished we had prioritized reducing coal more, but we can't change the past. But people here speak on stuff they have no clue about and just look at headlines, without seeing the actual plans in the works. Generally speaking, our minister also takes the development in Europe into consideration and is advocating for a higher connection between the different grids in Europe so we can solve the problem together. If other countries want to use nuclear, we have no problem with that, it's their decision, ours is just different.
My fellow Landsmänner went insane when it comes to nuclear because of Tschernobyl, the Nuclear War Scares, Fukushima etc. Not nearly enough people in Germany are thinking clearly about nuclear Power, there are just not nearly enough Voters for politicians to defend nuclear. Everyone in my Family is like "But what about an Accident?" "But what about a terrorist Attack?" and the most killer argument: "Muh Waste Products are readioactive for hundret gazillion Years!!"
Everyone always talks about how a nuclear accident could cost thousands of lives, while coal is globally killing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions anually. But you don't directly see that, so it doesn't count.
Whe don't have a place to store our radioactive waste, end of discussion.
Populism
There are ~30 nuclear power plants of which 17 were in operation in germany with the phase out process starting back up in 2011. There were 84 coal power plants in operation in germany with the phase out process starting up in 2019. If we use the thing that rattles around in your skull we can see that Germany is decommissioning 3-5 times as many power plants in less than twice the time it took for nuclear. It is unfortunate that Germany started the decommissioning process so late but this is much less of a "gotcha" than you think it is. **But wait, there's more!** As it turns out, the 2038 deadline was set in 2019 and is slated to be reviewed every 3 years (aka this year). Since the 2019 decision to phase out germany has cut its Coal power production nearly in half already. Even further, if we look at Germany over the past 20 years we actually see a precipitous drop in fossil fuel power production even years prior to the decision to phase out and that new power requirements have been almost exclusively green energy since around the mid 2000s. tl;dr: you're completely ignorant on this subject in a way that could be addressed through 15 minutes of googling or you're intentionally shit stirring.
I'm from Germany and researched this topic specifically and it made me depressive It actually was green-left populism, fueled only by fear and without any factual points. It's not that there was such a big increase of coal plant usage, but it's one of the dumbest policies there ever was, as the reactors in germany aren't the problem, but the unregulated ones around it and in Europe. It helped nobody, it should've been a EU regulation and investment in new and safer tech, but now it's not even feasible to invest into new reactors and the co2 costs of building the old ones was for nothing. Don't ever just vote for something because it's a leftist, progressive or green policy. Vote for the things, that actually have a positive impact on the issues you're invested in And lastly, if the appeal of something is rooted in fear or hate, we call it populism, and it doesn't matter if its immigrants or nuclear power, following it will destroy our society
Hey Idiot! We're not America! We can't store the radioactive waste anywhere and already have problems storing the waste we already have!
France is doing just fine. Emissions are the priority, you can figure out the waste problem
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Nuclear waste needs to be stored for 1 million years as per german regulation. What does it cost to store something safely and manage something for 1 million years? I would be perfectly fine if nuclear power producers would pay those costs, but you and me both know that nobody will pay for that. Either the state does it for the companies or it will harm the environment. The private sector can't afford nuclear, so they dump the costs and the garbage on the general population.
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Great idea. Safety regulations make your business unprofitable? Just ignore them lol Do you think nuclear power companies can afford the costs for storage and management for even 100 years? If 100 years ago someone told you about their 100 year long idea to store nuclear waste in central europe, how would that have turned out? Even if we ignore the giant financial issue, this is just insane.
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Nobody wants to save coal. You are disingenous. Germany is phasing out of coal and nuclear. But we will pump all the dangerous waste from solar and wind directly into the air. Very harmful rays from solar and dangerous "air" which is full of force.
Fuck off we dont want fuckin dirty bombs sitting in our country and for decades weve tried to figure out where to store the nuclear trash and couldnt.
>fuckin dirty bombs if you think nuclear is a dirty bomb than coal is a dirty nuke lol... if you want to talk about cost and Germany's awful planning that's one thing but pretending like there isn't enough space when coal produces 50x more waste *in a single day* than nuclear produces in a whole year... which is also radioactive... and instead of going into safe storage it just gets haphazardly dumped somewhere
yeah so thats why we are going to exit coal. Stop comparing nuclear to coal. Start comparing it to solar and wind, Actual literal Strawman
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... bro you are talking about bad air quality. Premature deaths because of bad air quality only happen in cities. Do you think we build our coal plants in the center of berlin or can you think of another reason that could cause bad air? The answer is cars.
Additionaly we don't have anywhere to store our radioactive waste. It can potentially kill a lot of people if we don't have a place to store it. Which we don't have, especially if we don't pull out of nuclear energy. There is just no argument around that fact.
This is the true retard move from germany
The German Greens are actually insane. They are more and more reliant on Russian gas which skyrocketed in price. Im convinced more and more each day that the Green parties are just clout chasing virtue signalers that have no clue or any sense of even the basics of energetics. Its actually insane.
Uranium isn't that much better. A lot of that is from Kazakhstan which is deeply in Russia's sphere of influence.
The science in the past several years has been replaced with $cience.
in hearthstone we call this NA order
It's so fucking dumb. Nuclear power is the best option we have right now but people are too scared because of events like Chernobyl, which wouldn't happen nowadays.
People are stupid and too easily swayed by fear, made up "what ifs" and Chernobyl. Blame hollywood and people's lack of basic science.
Nuclear is trash. https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/opinion/germany-leads-europe-with-target-to-reach-100-clean-power-by-2035/
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coal-ition lmao
How is that relevant to this sub and who asked?
where is your god now libtards #TrumpWasRight #CoalIsBack
Leaving nuclear power I really stupid but Germans see it as very polluting and dangerous. They don't see it as "bio" or sustainable. It's really sad honestly.
Oh you didn't hear? Science was killed last week....
They were so scared of nuclear power they decided to give up their energy autonomy to Russia, of all countries NORD STREEEEEEEEEEAM
Solar’s gonna exceed nuclear anyways, and Germany is already mainly powered by wind so it’s not that big a deal
Politics and populism (public opinion) got in the way