Speaking as someone who voted for them: I have never been more let down by anyone as much as the Green Party in my life.
They act like neocons nowadays basically.
Same here. It all feels like Jürgen Trittin's lifework, deciding end of nuclear in early 2000s, was prioritized higher than climate change. Everyday I'm looking at the energy mix, I'm getting very angry that they decided to bet everything on being able to grow renewables in never-before-manner; that in a situation of an almost recession, a lack of workers, government paralysis due to over-bureaucratic processes, et al. It's so stupid, it makes me wanna leave the country.
Edit: And though I'm pro delivering weapons to Ukraine, I was deeply disgusted by their socialmedia marketing ("free the leopards").
I don't think so. Lack of workers means you cannot e.g. produce all the goods you want to produce. This will result in less goods being sold -> recession. So basically the lack of workers could be understood as a potential to grow but if you cannot satisfy the demand for workers it will have the opposite effect.
I am not an economist so it might be totally wrong but that is my understanding.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I once believed their anti nuclear hysteria, because the media portrayed this as the only rational position. Reading non German sources quickly cured that delusion.
CDU/CSU is the new AfD.
SPD is the new CDU/CSU.
Greens are the new SPD.
FDP are the fiscally conservative socially whatever-we-think our-voters-like-that-day-ism. As usual.
Left are... a mess, please get rid of Wagenknecht and the remainder of the pro-russia tankie wing.
Everything is going wrong in German politics. The current progressive coalition just announced a law that affects me personally very much (our self-id law) and it's such a bad compromise, it legitimizes every fear - real, imagined or performative - right wingers have about trans people, conflicts with existing anti-discrimination policy and makes the legal standing for every trans person (and presumably cis people who don't look "normal" enough) worse, the only good thing they did was eliminate the meaningless hurdles that were mostly monetary anyway (nobody "failed" the prior way to officially change your documents; people just didn't do it for fear of being retraumatized or for lack of funds). I am legitimately so done with politics in this country that I'm considering moving to Spain or Iceland.
Friedrich Merz (the populist, far more aligned with CSU) and Armin Laschet (the less than competent and charismatic chancellor candidate) happened. But mostly Merkel leaving happened.
Merkel was extremely popular with the voter base. Not letting her run again was considered an extremely bad take in the CDU/CSU. So she was chancellor for 16 years. She is a consensus seeking politician without too much hard convictions, but being in coalition meant that a lot of her work put her pretty far left within her party (in absolutes, probably slightly right center; she still voted against gay marriage).
The new CDU/CSU lives mostly in the opposition and the only voters they have left to molilize have run off to the AfD, being unhappy with Merkel (and a lot of them have simply died). Most Merkel voters moved on to SPD or even Greens; the only thing that kept them with the party was Merkel as a person.
Well, if you want environmental politic, they are, by far, the least worst party. I vote for them even though I fundamentally disagree on their position on nuclear. This is called making compromises, it's painful, but it's the grown up thing to do.
FDP has climate nagationists on their payroll. Only the far left die Linke has actually a better environmental programme than the green but their position (Schwarzer, Wagenknecht...) on the Ukraine war showed they just exited reality a while back...
It's a sad state to have to vote for the "least worse", but I think it's been like that for while, I just didn't want to see it...
At least in France the trend hasn't come, the French Greens (EELV) are still anti-nuclear, as confirmed by their latest party congress a few months ago and their recent vehement fear mongering campaign ("brutal return towards a radioactive future" [0]). What's even worse is that their position has been adopted by the left-wing coalition as a whole, and when questioned on this some Green politicians have decided to turn it into a class/race issue (i quote, "maybe only white urban engineers from the high classes care about the energy mix"[1]).
Meanwhile EPRs, developed by a French company, are (finally) starting to come online which means next deployments will have learned lots of valuable lessons and thus be faster and cheaper.
The greens are the easy scapegoat for conservatives in Germany for everything they don’t like.
In this case the greens are supposedly responsible for a proliferation of coal by being anti-nuclear.
The reality is that the greens fight hardest for an earlier exit from coal, not hard enough though as seen from some environmentalists. In this case the greens managed that the mine is getting closed earlier but some villages will still be destroyed for it. The way they want to replace coal is with renewables.
The other big parties, SPD (social democrats), CDU/CSU (conservatives) and FDP (mostly financial liberalism) were all more for keeping nuclear but also slowing renewables down because of coal miner unions or closeness to big electricity producers, to Putin or to the industry heavily relying on cheap Russian gas. Coal and nuclear plants were run by the same companies in Germany.
You often try to see the debate being steered towards being about coal versus nuclear while the reality is nuclear + fossil fuels versus renewables
I don't think this is about being a scapegoat.. the Greens always had on their agenda to shut down nuclear power completely. I think in the 70ies to 80ies and later there was a big movement that protested a lot against nuclear power (Atomkraft? Nein danke!).
And recently they pushed forward to close down the last 3 reactors even though we might have troubles with our energy supply in the near future.
Greens might have been fighting coal, but were fighting harder against nuclear, which in the end led to the proliferation of coal.
> You often try to see the debate being steered towards being about coal versus nuclear while the reality is nuclear + fossil fuels versus renewables
Just the opposite! One often sees the debate steered towards nuclear + fossil fuels vs renewables (just like you did here!), while the reality is coal vs nuclear.
Nice scapegoating but it was the two major parties, CDU and SPD (Conservatives and Social Democrats) who signed this one along with a former chancellor on the board of Rosneft, the primary beneficiary
Now they conveniently blame the green party who certainly wanted it but never got close enough to power to bully anyone into actually doing it.
Conservatives ran the country for almost two decades, with Angela Merkel and yet the green party is the reason.
It’s almost as transparent as people blaming Democrats for Trumps debt expansion. Works every time
They are worse than the fossil fuel industry. At least the fossil fuel industry helped billions of people, making the green revolution possible and lifting billions out of poverty.
The anti-nuclear environmentalists have no good to balance out their harm.
Correct, but that doesn't let the nuclear power industry off the hook. Statistically, they have an adequate record. But there are way too many examples of people denying or covering up nuclear failures only to be subsequently embarrassed by facts. I'm pro-nuclear but reflexive endorsement of the industry is just as embarrassing as reflexive opposition.
The risks of coal power are dominated by the typical case. People have been living near coal plants for generations, they know what the risks mean in the real life, and they have generally found the risks acceptable.
Nuclear risks are dominated by rare disasters. Because most people have not experienced nuclear disasters near home, they don't know what it would mean in the real life. As the risks are unfamiliar, many people find them scary.
> People have been living near coal plants for generations, they know what the risks mean in the real life, and they have generally found the risks acceptable.
…honestly I'm like 100% sure they don't know what the risks are.
Every time anyone does a study on air pollution it turns out the effects are even more horrible than we already thought it was. Like it gives you dementia and cancer.
That's why I mentioned "real life". People may not know the specific risks associated with specific causes, but they think they understand the overall risks of living with coal power. After all, they have already lived their lives with coal power, and they have seen many other people do so. If the quality of life has been acceptable, the risks must be acceptable as well, if there are no alternatives that are obviously better.
On the other hand, people tend to overestimate unfamiliar risks. If you only hear about nuclear disasters (or earthquakes or hurricanes) in the news, it's easy to assume that the risks are more significant than they actually are.
Chernobyl is a special case, with a uniquely terrible design and uniquely terrible management by a uniquely evil regime. No operating civilian reactor has any possibility of failure that catastrophic. But even taking Chernobyl into account, nuclear remains by far one of the safest forms of energy, rivaled only by solar: https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Do you consider Fukushima also not a modern design? Do you then also follow that old reactors should be shut down? (8 reactors of the same type as Chernobyl are still running for instance)
Fukushima power plant started construction in 1967, no one would consider that a modern design.
If it was actually possible to build a new nuclear power plant I'm sure the old ones would be replaced. If it wasn't for chernobyl plus three mile island (which released a comically low amount of radiation) maybe the west would have completed its conversion to nuclear instead of essentially pausing all construction for 30 years. But right now the options are essentially shut it down and replace with fossil fuels (wind and solar are not great providers of base loads for obvious reasons) or extend the license.
Are you trying to sound uninformed and unworthy of respect? Those 8 reactors were retrofitted to prevent another Chernobyl. Yes not at first due to the corrupt nature of the Soviet Union, but it did occur.
Also right now there is exactly 1 confirmed death from exposure to radiation from Fukushima, and a few dozen cases of cancer, radiation burns and injury. Pretty sure coal kills more directly and indirectly in any given month.
>As of 27 February 2017, the Fukushima prefecture government counted 2,129 "disaster-related deaths" in the prefecture.[21][19][22][23] This value exceeds the number that have died in Fukushima prefecture directly from the earthquake and tsunami.[24] "Disaster-related deaths" are deaths attributed to disasters and are not caused by direct physical trauma, but does not distinguish between people displaced by the nuclear disaster compared to the earthquake / tsunami. As of year 2016, among those deaths, 1,368 have been listed as "related to the nuclear power plant" according to media analysis
Looks like that 2xxx number is disaster-related deaths? And the related to the nuclear power plant is 1368.
It is a bit confusing what that exactly entails. It seems to include people who committed suicide due to the evacuation, but surely their can't have been 1300 suicides. Is it people who are assumed to have died only because they weren't at home? How do you die due to an evacuation anyways?
None of this really seems explained, unless it really is 1300 suicides.
The state of the art has improved since Fukushima was built. But it's not even in the same universe as Chernobyl, and reactors of that age shouldn't all be shut down, no.
Only one person died from radiation from the Fukushima accident, a tiny fraction of the total deaths from the tsunami. It's an insignificant risk compared to other forms of energy.
Is safety only about death? Why are deaths in uranium mining always ignored? How much preventative measures have been and are still being taken throughout Europe because of Chernobyl and how much damage did that do?
Why do nuclear proponents only compare with coal, never with renewables?
Uranium is very energy-dense (https://xkcd.com/1162/), you don't need to mine a lot of it to get a lot of energy out. So to produce the same amount of energy, there will be far fewer deaths from uranium mining compared to coal mining, or oil drilling, or even (IIRC) rare earth mining to make solar panels.
> How much preventative measures have been and are still being taken throughout Europe because of Chernobyl and how much damage did that do?
Many preventative measures are reasonable and necessary! This isn't incompatible with nuclear being safe. For example, flying is the safest form of travel, in part because there is strong safety regulation around airplanes.
(That being said, a lot of the regulation around nuclear is excessive and counterproductive)
> Why do nuclear proponents only compare with coal, never with renewables?
The biggest problem with solar and wind is that they are intermittent, so alone they can't support a reliable grid. There are some other issues too (solar takes up a lot of land area, wind turbines kill millions of birds). But all technologies have their tradeoffs; I will support renewables where they make sense, as a component of a reliable grid alongside nuclear.
Geothermal is something that doesn't gen enough attention IMO. Currently, it is only viable in a few locations, but potentially with some more R&D it could become a lot more important.
I would be fine with living right next to a nuclear power station. I have lived near a uranium enrichment factory. Far preferable to living next to a lignite coal plant, that's for sure!
"...asked whether respondents agreed or disagreed with the statement "I would be comfortable living close to a nuclear power plant", only 28% agreed and 60% disagreed." [1]
The part about it being due to uninhabitable cities (referring to Chernobyl, Pripyat and Fukushima) was conjecture - I don't know people's reasons for it.
28% of the total population can provide full occupancy of all the areas near nuclear plants. Those ignorant or willing to live in discomfort will ease the capitalist equalizing that will naturally encourage that 28% to fill those houses.
Fair enough, but the housing prices in the area will take a huge hit while the non-supporters move out. It would be political suicide for a local government to support it.
When you say "many" you cited people in Australia. Does that speak or is that representative, for the entire world?
Also, my opinion of Australians is slightly shifted after reading that information, but who knows how they crafted that survey. Did they compare it to living next to a coal-fired plant? I am not able to easily find the survey methodology.
Anyhow,the science is abundantly clear that there is no reason to fear living near a nuclear power plant.
Renewables (wind and solar) are intermittent. The storage technology to make them reliable without a backup source of power generation, does not yet exist at the scale that would be needed. For now, any viable plan for full decarbonization must include nuclear.
Yes, wind and solar are highly volatile; coal, nuclear and natural gas are not. When they decided to disable nuclear power, they wanted to replace it with natural gas from Russia (that's why they promoted Nord Stream 2), since it produces less CO2 than coal, but those gas deliveries were largely cut off because of the Ukraine war. So now only coal is left as a stable energy source.
The storage technology to make nuclear cost-effective also does not yet exist, as demand is also not constant. Nuclear is a pretty bad complement to renewables on a grid: it loses terribly to renewables in a free market, relying on subsidies to get built and operate, and also does not actually make up for the intemittency of renewables. People keep saying that we need both but frankly it's one or the other.
You have the same issue with nuclear as it cannot load-follow and technical issues can lead to massive shutdowns like in France last year.
There exist several answers that have to be combined:
Using biogas to load-follow. Currently biogas produces around 8% of electricity but mostly as base-load.
Directing the use of electricity. This was already done to deal with nuclear‘s similar issue by offering cheaper prices in the night. With smart meters we can offer hourly based billing.
Batteries for intra-day storage is already getting deployed as it’s already economical and we will see much more in the future.
For seasonal low-points we will probably first continue to use gas but in a much smaller quantity if the other points also get deployed. At some point hydrogen will make sense.
You don't have to load-follow when you can use the power to mine bitcoins. /s
In all seriousness, nuclear power plants are also very controllable within a certain bound, you just can't turn them completely off or else they take a long time to turn back on. Control of power output is what reactor control rods are for. Coal power is similar - you can control the temperature of the boiler but you can't stop the turbine completely if you want to turn it back on any time soon.
Nuclear costs are predominantly fixed costs though. Reducing output makes electricity from nuclear even more expensive. On top of that it leads to faster deterioration.
You're busy looking for a perfect solution where there is none. The same arguments about upfront costs and usage-based depreciation apply to batteries, too, for example. They would apply to coal and natural gas plants too except that their fuel is really expensive per kWh.
If your objective is to eliminate carbon emissions, this won't do that. I'm not a purist though, if a small amount of natural gas or biogas needs to be burned at peak load that's not a huge deal.
> Batteries for intra-day storage
What do you do when cloudy + no wind lasts for much more than a day (as can happen in winter)?
I'm sorry this is incredibly misleading. " Load following" ?
Nuclear power is the most reliable and consistent energy source in the world. It's not even close! If you are going to spew garage, please cite it. This isn't reddit.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the average capacity factor (which measures the actual electricity output of a power plant compared to its maximum potential output) for nuclear power plants around the world was 81% in 2019.
This is higher than most other types of power plants, including coal-fired power plants (which had an average capacity factor of 53% in 2019) and natural gas-fired power plants (which had an average capacity factor of 46% in 2019).
The reason why there were "massive shutdowns" was because they didn't do maintenance during COVID as well as noticed abnormal corrosion.
Regarding uptime, heres some data.
Nuclear Reactor Up Time.
User
What is the average up time of a nuclear reactor in France?
ChatGPT
As of my knowledge cutoff date of September 2021, the average up time of a nuclear reactor in France was about 75%, according to data from the French electricity company EDF. This means that, on average, the reactors were operational and producing electricity for about 75% of the time. However, it's important to note that this figure can vary from year to year and from reactor to reactor, depending on factors such as maintenance schedules, unexpected shutdowns, and other issues
User
Can you cite your sources for uptime of nuclear power in France?
chatGPT
Sure, here are some sources for the uptime of nuclear power in France:
The French government's Ministry of Ecological Transition provides a quarterly report on the performance of the country's electricity generation sources, including nuclear power. The latest report, covering Q4 2020, states that the availability rate for the nuclear fleet during that period was 71.2%. Source: https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/Performance...
Electricity use isn’t constant throughout the day or the week, so you also have to produce less. This is called load following and a good thing.
Nuclear reactors are pretty bad at it, but if you have a lot of nuclear reactors like France does you have to do it anyway, which is why France has a lower capacity factor for nuclear than other countries.
For fossil-fuel- and biogas-driven plants a low capacity factor usually isn’t a big problem as fuel costs dominate. For nuclear fixed costs mostly dominate which means that a low capacity factor also means much higher costs.
Nuclear plants can load follow just fine. They just prefer not to as the capital costs and not fuel is biggest factor. So might as well keep producing power if the grid stability accepts it.
The Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz for building out renewables was decided for together with the nuclear phase—out as part of the Energiewende under Schröder. Of course they are strongly linked.
Let’s not pretend it was antinuclear environmentalists who passed the bill with the votes of a grand coalition under a CDU chancellor following and SPD chancellor who turned out to be a Russian asset.
The narrative that somehow environmentalist managed to pass this bill against the will of conservatives and social democrats is a nice Dolchstosslegende
They are really advanced for renewable relatively speaking, but also just got rid of the last nuclear so they ran out of options since green tech doesn't cover 100% yet in Germany.
IMHO and in many external observers opinion they did it the wrong way, the sane way would be as renewable adoption grows to first phase out carbon, then gas, then nuclear. Gas was forced to phase out (Russia->Ukraine war), and for some reason they are closing nuclear before renewable is common enough, so the only remaining option is carbon.
Merkel wasn't any better. She tried to be greener than the Greens. It was under her government that nuclear was decided to get phased out. Fukishima did a panic on her government, even though German nuclear plants are neither on earthquake faults nor on tsunami-prone coasts.
Her way of drifting more and more in that direction has propagated a new right wing extremest party (AfD) to come up as well. A ton of things she did wrong domestically.
People describe foreign countries for a lot of reasons. One of them is to describe the foreign country. Another is to explain how the country the person doing the the describing is from either should or should not be doing things.
The second reason is very popular because the alternative is saying "If we keep or start doing X in 10 years this country will be heaven on earth or a hellscape!" When people hear that even true believers will be a tiny bit skeptical.
On the other hand "Country Y does X and it's a hellscape or maybe heaven on earth!" In that case - there's no "maybe" on the table. The result is right now.
France is heavily importing German electricity, so that does not work out. Sources are many, but here [0] is a random one from January "German Power Exports to France Surge to Highest in 30 Years"
These imports are in part due to Macron's exceptionally foolish decision to close the Fessenheim nuclear reactor in northeast France (near German border). The reactor had had all the needed upgrades and could have kept working for many years, but instead Macron decided to follow through on an old campaign promise of his universally reviled predecessor.
It looks like you've got an important and relevant point there but if you lead with snark, you'll probably just provoke more flamewar and make the thread more predictable.
A better version of this comment would drop the first couple words and then add information to explain what you're talking about and/or how you know it.
They made a lot of progress, but compared to a lot of other countries, they started from a poor position with almost zero hydro and a lot of coal.
Much of their progress was replacing coal with cleaner natural gas imported from Russia, which they had to reverse. They also had to make up for the old nuclear power plants that were retired without replacements.
I think we used to be at the forefront but since 2-3 years China gained a lot of ground in terms of high tech Green energy products. They might as well have surpassed us in few fields.
It’s not irrational. Nuclear isn’t that compatible with renewables because it is bad at load following (technical and economically even worse).
Further nuclear likely comes with catastrophes like Fukushima every few decades and the problem of nuclear waste (just calculate what posting a single person to watch it for a million years costs). Germany suffers from Chernobyl to this day with mushrooms and game being contaminated with radionuclides above legal limits.
Germany has managed to reduce both fossil fuel use in total as well as coal use for electricity while shutting down nuclear (https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutsch...). Nuclear now being shut down we can expect faster shutdown of coal plants.
German here. To be fair, Germany has a bit of a history concerning energy. I'm not blindly supporting those actions (and am actually deeply concerned) but a bit of context might be valuable:
1) In early 2000s the then government (coalition of Social Democrats and Green party) decided to end nuclear and to fully transform the country to renewable energy; the Greens are heavily influenced by 1980s anti-nuclear movement. I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time. As a "bridge technology" they wanted to use natural gas (hence the good friendship between ex-chancellor Schröder and Putin).
2) The Merkel-led gov't in 2010 (coalition of Conservatives and Liberals) decided to prolong nuclear (no real reason, imho more of a "we know better").
3) Fukushima happened in 2011. Germans were concerned in surveys and Merkel (imho stupidly) decided to make nuclear's deadline even earlier (end of 2022) causing huge fees the gov't had to pay to energy companies (afair 1-2 billion EUR). Running plants were shutdown between 2011 and 2022. Meanwhile Germany's dependence on cheap natural gas imports from Russia went up. Chemical Industry, electrification and warming were the main uses. I think they doubled or so at that time.
4) Putin invaded Ukraine. Sanctions on gas exports (imho rightly) happened and gas prices skyrocketed. Putin completely turned off the gas. The current gov't (Social Democrats, Liberals and Green party) had to decide on what to do. So they decided to build LNG ports and continue phasing out nuclear which at that time only contributed around 6% to electrical power because all the other plants were already shutdown.
5) They still needed to find a way to produce electric energy in case renewable energy is not available (due to cheap Russian gas there was zero incentive to create waus to save energy) so they're now burning coal and heavily need to buy CO2 certificates and bet on that it will get so expensive that energy companies will invest heavily into renewables.
The signal though is horrifying. I hate everything of this typical German kind of stupid compromises.
> I still think that this decision was mindblowingly progressive and valuable at that time.
But that's not rational. Disabling nuclear power more than negates the effects of investing in wind and solar. Actually wind and solar are worse than nuclear, since the former are highly volatile and can't act as a stable baseline energy source.
Not necessarily. They gave scientists and industry 25+ years to develop ways to save excess renewable energy (e.g. by hydrolysis) and electrify industrial processes. Nothing happened, instead the industry lobbied the gov'ts for more Russian gas.
Plus, we have the European Power Grid which lets you import and export electricity to neighboring countries and e.g. France is so deeply invested into nuclear, they would always have excess energy (sidenote: due to mismanagement and droughts France heavily needed to import electricity from Germany).
Germany afair set a world record in generating solar electricity around 2012 while it was losing its whole solar industry (150k+ jobs) to China, bc the Merkel gov't suddenly stopped subsidizing them.
> They gave scientists and industry 25+ years to develop ways to save excess renewable energy (e.g. by hydrolysis) and electrify industrial processes. Nothing happened, instead the industry lobbied the gov'ts for more Russian gas.
That's absurd. First, it was actually politicians like Manuela Scheswig who promoted Russian gas even though nuclear was better. Second, you can't simply blame "scientists and industry" for the effects of bad policy. If politicians turn off nuclear energy and simply hope that "scientists and industry" would readily figure out how to store vast amounts of energy, then that's naive. There is no justification for basing your policy on wishful thinking about non-existent science fiction technology.
The "non existent science fiction technology" you're talking about (wind turbines, solar, hydrolysis) is already there for many decades. It just needed a proper push to incentivize the industry to produce and deploy it at massive scale. When deployed at scale it constantly produces clean energy at unbeatable prices per kWh. Compare that to nuclear being heavily subsidized by tax money to achieve affordable customer prices. The only real downside is that renewables take a lot of space (2% of Germany's area only for onshore wind turbines).
NB: Schwesig promoted Russian gas to improve her local industry. She was the pawn sacrifice of the "leadership" in the whole shitshow.
Nuclear energy works since more than half a century, large scale energy storage is still not available. So yes, it is de facto a science fiction technology at this point. It does not exist, much less does it have unbeatable prices. Again, one cannot simply demand that it is available and blame "scientists and industry" when it isn't available. Regarding subsidies: Germany has in fact massively subsidized renewable energy, but all this got negated by needlessly disabling nuclear power. Germany produces way more CO2 than France.
Ah, I see, solar and wind being volatile are not a problem because you have other countries to generate power for you, even if it is nuclear (that apparently is bad) or coal. What?
Yes, and their argument was that this is a bad match up.
Renewable energy is only available at certain times, whereas nuclear is as stable as you can get. You can't pause energy generation for nuclear power plants, which is why coal/gas is more effective in this context, as you can start and stop these at will.
(no real reason, imho more of a "we know better"). - yeah they did. They realised thay relying on a putin would lead to more issues and energy storage had no solution incoming.
I see. That's probably why while Merkel was in power, the overall dependence on Russian gas imports raised significantly and her administrations essentially stopped renewables. Meanwhile she decided to end nuclear earlier.
There was no "realizing things" in her administrations. There was just erratic opportunistic actions.
I think you can explain all this nicely with: "SD leader Gerhardt Schröder immediately joined as a Russian oil lobbyist after leaving politics".
Greens were useful idiots to Gerhardt's plan to power Germany's economy using cheap natural gas from then-nascent Putin regime in Russia.
It's arguable he wasn't wrong in fact, if you look at the fact that Germany drove a lot of the EU economy for the past 2 decades, he's probably feeling quite justified in selling his country's energy sector out to Russia.
France is also a smaller economy with a smaller population with fewer industry.
they also have a significant issue with dumping hot water into streams killing off the flora and fauna, which means in the heat of summer they have to scale back their nuclear stations significantly.
Even when nuclear power plants weren't leaking dangerous levels of radiation over cities they were still producing hazardous waste we had no real means to deal with besides hiding it under the rug and hoping to hell it stays contained.
Getting rid of nuclear power would have been fine if renewables had advanced enough to replace them, and for a while it was looking like that was entirely possible. I've always thought investing in some new nuclear power plants would be a good idea so we could get off coal sooner but getting rid of nuclear power plants should still be our ultimate goal.
It played a big roll in making photovoltaics economical and boosting wind. Today more energy is produced worldwide with renewables than coal or nuclear.
Which is bad. Investment in nuclear would have been far better. Countries could have followed the French model, which works much better than the German one.
Are we living in the same universe? From what I understood, EDF the quasi-government agency managing nuclear in France is heavily indebted (~50 billion EUR), they have maintenance problems that made them shutdown about half of their reactors, they have problems with freshwater supply because France is in a drought (as other parts of Europe, sth which will get worse with climate change) and they have a cost and build-time explosion with some new power plants.
Are you living in the universe that had EDF with 0 debt until the greens prevented investments in nuclear (constructions & maintenance) to push for alternatives power sources (gas & wind/solar; mainly) which pushed a once world leader to a 50B hole; increased France CO2 emission; pushed energy cost up; and lead the talents and knowledge that French had developed to get lost making it difficult & expensive to go back to their former glory.
I could forgive any blunder Germany did/does if it at least had:
* A radical plan to expand green energy more than any other country
* Or was one of the leading countries behind fusion or had grand plans for being the first to open up experimental fusion power plants / research as soon as it's available.
Especially after the Russian gas fiasco, I just can't wrap my head around Germany with their plan.
It feels almost like there is none, just how does Germany expect to fulfill any green transition if they aren't investing like crazy in one or the other?
Plus, if the CO2 certificates get horribly expensive in the upcoming years and there's only renewables left, then energy companies will invest all their money in renewables and developing ways to make it a stable energy source.
The plan for German energy independence is renewables. There’s a lot of coal that was now decided to stay in the ground. Also the coal mine of the article was decided to be closed later. The only fossil infrastructure being expanded is for liquid gas import to replace Russian gas imports.
No they bet on cheap russian power due to a combination of compromised politicians and the lure of extra cheap and low friction power.
Make no mistake, people didn’t like nuclear in Germany for historic reasons fusing cold war armageddon fears, Chernobyl Trauma and anti-americanism. The majority did not like it. Every nuclear fuel transport was a fight. Every power plant was fought by a combination of NIMBY and groundswell opposition. We are tightly settled and no place could be found to dispose of nuclear fuel that didn’t have the entire local population rise up.
They voted for it to be abandoned. And then the russians came along offering basically out of sight, NIMBY proof power cheap, an unreasonable package for politicians.
(Germany’s are the greatest NIMBY nation in the world. We fight power lines (it makes children sick), wind power (it kills birds), prisons (they create crime), internet lines (they destroy nature), wifi (makes children sick). We, especially our intellectuals, are a bunch of crazy ass people with centuries deep insane obsession about homeopathy, Kneipp. Ideological blinders so large they blot out the sun about misunderstood peaceful russians.
The last 15 years of German prosperity was not, as people would love to delude themselves, engineering ingenuity- it as powered by cheap Russian power, out of sight, and Chinese Manufacturing. The entire economy got addicted to it and the party stopped last year and the cost of it has become apparent.
The Nuclear decision has to be seen in that context, a ruinously stupid short term focused energy policy influenced by well placed Russian corruption and passed by the largest parties in the country because their constituents, large industries, donors and yes, unions, wanted it. It was a devils bargain but it allowed them to pretend progress.
Now the green party, who yes always wanted this but never ever had the power to force any of it, is a convenient scapegoats for ‘you made the population do it’, but that entirely flies in the face of how decisions are made and laws are passed in Germany.
This reminds me of the introduction to Walden where Thoreau is sitting on his porch one day, and he sees men laboring intensely to move logs one way down the street in front of his house, and then later that day, sees a different set of men laboring intensely to move the same logs back the other direction.
Only under a blind self interest system like capitalism can this kind of wasted effort be rationalized.
Yes, politics and people, those two are interlinked in a democracy. Blaming capitalism is a convenient scapegoat, since this shifts the blame from both politicians and voters.
>The decision to demolish Lützerath was made in accordance with the country’s new coal policy to temporarily increase the use of lignitefor electricity production during the energy crisis, Clean Energy Wire reported.
If only there was another power source that could be used, perhaps one that didn't rely on burning fossil fuels, if only...
This news aside, I think the world still associates Germany with engineering excellence so, to see them abandon nuclear power for political reasons comes as a shock.
There’s also a history of civic distrust when it comes to nuclear. After Chernobyl there was conflicting information about safe thresholds and later revisions. There’s been some write-ups stating government transparency and trust are as big of an issue as safety.
The CDU was in power when they proposed the timelines that ended up in the closures we saw recently, but the electoral success of the Green Party in that election cycle was a key factor. Your summary is disingenuous.
The original dissolution was passed as a plan during Schröder's first term, aka in the SPD/Green government, in 2002. Later, in 2010, the CDU/FDP government modified the plan and gave the power plant providers more budget. About half a year after this law has passed the Bundestag, the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident happened and a commission was established to study the security of nuclear power. Then, yes, CDU and FDP agreed upon a new plan to exit nuclear power earlier than their original extension planned, and some power plants were turned off right away.
You can point your finger at the CDU, but saying that the CDU was the big driving force is disingenous.
It seems that Germany's descisions on exiting nuclear power plants are always unhappily timed. First, Fukushima happens, making the extension a few months earlier look really weird. Then, the Ukraine war happens, rendering Germany's original plan moot to replace coal with natural gas from russia, and everyone is shaking their head again as Germany is keeping to the original plan.
It was the Greens who campaigned throughout the 80s and beyond to instill irrational fear in German kids in the 80s, so they would opt for an impulsive solution, instead of a rational one in subsequent decades. It was always the Greens whose very platform stood for ending nuclear power, by any means necessary. The reason why Germany today is so staunchly anti-nuclear is because that's how the Greens ("Die Gruenen") defined itself as a political party in the 80s. In fact, that was a (if not the) principal motivation for its inception. The party may seem more mainstream 30 years later, but around the 80s when they laid all the groundwork for the anti-nuclear stance of present day Germany, they were definitely a party still better known for, and even defined by their more radical members.
That the current generation of voters who supported the shutdown of nuclear power production were substantially "encouraged" to adopt such views by said Greens' actions and politics when they were children and teenagers living in the 80s is incontrovertible fact. So, even if Merkel ended up as the one who executed the will of the people as head of the CDU, that will had nothing to do with CDU policy, and certainly not in the 80s and 90s. That was by definition the policy of the Greens, who also laid the groundwork for the irrational fear that Germans in their 40s and 50s have been cultivating for decades.
Why can i say this with complete certainty? Because I was one of those kids.
Germany as a society tends to be prone to obsessions. The current one is climate. There is no other discussion in the media and politics. Nothing else important to focus on.
Kids are glueing themselves onto streets because their obsessions aren't satisfied strongly enough. The brainwashing is real.
Unfortunately obsessions lead to lack of wider thinking or logic.
The irony is that our obsession with disabling nuclear power works contrary to any climate obsession. When the two are played out against each other, the anti-nuclear ambitions win. Disabling nuclear power is apparently more important than disabling coal power plants. And than dealing with soaring energy costs and a potential blackout.
> Worrying about sea level going up 10cm in his/her lifetime is a rich person hobby.
Worrying about the future past next year is definitely a rich person hobby, if you define "rich" as "not imminently starving".
Sea level rise is the least of the trouble. Look at fisheries decline (yield per inflation-adjusted-dollar spent has been recorded for a long time now - in spite of new tech it's been dropping for over a century), temperature-driven crop failures, increased frequency of severe storms damaging infrastructure.
Sea level is projected to rise 30 centimeters over the next 30 years. The rate is gradually accelerating, so the coming century will see more than a meter.
But the primary near-term risks from climate change are heat damaging crops, (wet) heat killing humans, declining soil moisture in some regions, and increased risk of flooding along some rivers. Over two centuries, coastal cities may be inundated, but that is a long time.
About 200 Germans died in the floods last year - far more than those who died from the cold. And climate change increased both the likeliness and the intensity of the rains.
So no, this isn't something rich people will face in 50 years. It's something everyone faces today.
Both are real risks, but humans are biased to be disproportionately sensitive to near term risks and tend to underestimate long term risks. In addition, poor people tend to be disproportionately affected.
It's those above the poverty line but only just that should be worrying most: the rich will likely be mostly fine, it's everyone else who is going to suffer much more from it.
I actually think you've put your finger on the actual problem. Sometimes these obsessions lead to success, because obsession and persistence can be the same.
But let's take the last year, sanctions policies that lead them to trade direct resource imports from Russia to having the same imports but paying premium through brokers like Morocco, India and Chinese LNG(all coming from Russia). Let's remember what the BASF CEO said before it escalated.[1]
A lot of people in Germany were begging the government to postpone the shutdown of the remaining power plants until they have replacements, but the ideological Greens just charged ahead replacing Nuclear with Coal to achieve their ideological goal of removing nuclear. They have also been at the forefront of pushing legislation at an EU level to block nuclear in various forms.[2][3]
I've seen these obsessions in various other parts of society. I've had people stand behind me waiting telling me they could not pass anywhere but where I am even though they could just take a turn around me. I've personally experienced and heard from multiple people at the CCC that their Math teachers would punish them for achieving a result with a different technique than what the teacher taught them.
> I think the world still associates Germany with engineering excellence…
Do people feel that way? Their automobiles are some of the worst from an engineering perspective and the only software company I can think of is the dinosaur SAP.
When I think of Germany I do not think of good engineering but rather automobiles that lose so much value so quickly because the have expensive and frequent maintenance costs and outdated software companies. Germany makes things unnecessarily complex and therefore prone to failure. It’s a cultural thing I believe.
In which ways us Germany considered excellent at engineering today?
Whoa whoa. The "association" OP speaks of is down to effective marketing - creating a common image of German product/industrial design as meticulous and high performing - not some objective engineering ranking.
Other places make performant things that have far more longevity. Japan for instance. It’s a cultural thing in Germany. I’ve spent a good deal of time there and was surprised how good at marketing they are and how bad at building. German exports of many things are of very low quality but high prices.
At the electricity generation, ironically, the two well regarded players are Siemens and GE, only Siemens for its quality (what may or may not reflect the reality of the last decades, no idea).
I don’t understand why Germany wasn’t livid when their leader literally went to work for Russian oil interests [1]. That seems like blatant corruption, doesn’t it?
What I would do, if I wanted to increase Germany’s reliance on Russia, is use money to ensure the voices of real German people who oppose nuclear power were amplified.
All Russia had to do is use their unlimited money (from selling gas to Germany) to buy some influence in German news papers (difficulty level: easy) and maybe pay some people to organize protests.
Of course the fact that Russians bought Schroder isn't even speculation (unlike the above). To me the above is extremely likely to have happened (and probably still on-going).
Even in the early days of Putin's war Germany was still sponsoring Putin by buying many 100's of millions of EUR of gas from him.
They "got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector" by reopening old German coal mines, firing up coal power plants and shifting gas imports from Russia to the US + importing tons of nuclear energy from France.
Germany only stopped buying Russian gas for > 50% of their energy needs AFTER a war started AFTER the pipelines to Russia got bombed and AFTER they had no other choice.
Yes, the plan was set in motion many years earlier. But the reliance Russian energy (whether fossil or uranium fuel) would have been there in either case. Energy exports are a big lever for Russia in foreign affairs.
But the Russians didn’t use the energy leverage so far, did they? Germany seemingly decided to do the damage to themselves on their own. Wouldn’t it be better to take time and find alternative sources of energy first? This is what I don’t understand.
I think the idea is that Russia fosters interdependence on their natural resources as a way to limit retaliation for territorial expansion. It worked with Georgia and Crimea, but they may have miscalculated with Ukraine.
We could've let the existing plants run for a while, but getting a supply chain restarted and plants recertified when the entire country is phrasing them out is not trivial, especially not on short notice. (And also, the fuel rods usually come from Russia).
We also would have to get foreign workers. A lot of NPP workers went into early retirement.
Storage of nuclear wast turned out to be a hard to solve problem.
As of now Germany has no “Endlagerstätte”, all current wast storage sides are intermediate. The last attempt to establish a permanent storage side failed horribly and the nuclear wast that was interned there will be extracted under high costs.
On a philosophical level everything is an intermediate solution. Casks designed to last 50-100 years are much longer in duration than our solutions for most other things.
Unlike nuclear waste which takes up space in barrels, coal-fired radiation and pollution isn't a problem, because it goes into the air where everyone can breathe it. This is clearly better for the environment and also human health: just ask any German environmentalist.
most radioactive waste created by coal power is filtered and ends up in barrels as well, and nuclear power also release radioactive waste into the atmosphere for everyone to breath, especially when looking at the whole cycle, including mining, milling and reprocessing.
Well, BWRs and PWRs release Carbon-14 into the atmosphere where it is dwarfed by the Carbon-14 created by cosmic rays banging into Nitrogen ... and the total amount from both sources is truly tiny with a half life (of remaining in atmosphere) of 12 to 16 years.
The decay half life of Carbon-14 is almost 6,000 years .. ie: it decays slowly and the small amounts of Carbon-14 release even smaller amounts of ionising radiation due that slow decay.
Per human body Carbon-14 (mostly from cosmic ray interactions, magnitudes less from reactors) makes up a very very small part of regular mean environmental radiation per year per kilogram.
Source: a decade+ running numbers on global geophysical exploration surveys: background magnetics, radiation, gravity, etc instrumentation running 12/7/360 (daylight hours, all days of the week, little downtime) across multiple airframes.
Looking at table 13 of annex b, how does the plutonium-239 emitted in the atmosphere by the reprocessing plants compare to naturally occurring atmospheric plutonium? (scnr - the comparison to cosmic rays just reminds me of the fuel industry claiming that atmospheric lead is natural) I know the answer, i want to highlight the cherry picking ;-) Sure there is natural carbon-14, but there is natural radon-222 as well, does that mean the radon exhaust of coal power plants can also be ignored when comparing coal and nuclear power generation industries to each other? I think not.
The UNSCEAR boils all these complex details down to a collective effective dose per generated electricity (in man-sievert per gigawatt year) for atmospheric discharges. This hides a lot of details, including the mentioned plutonium-239 as well as the carbon-14 releases, the radon-222 exhaust, and the uranium-238 traces being discharged to the atmosphere both by coal burning power plants and the uranium mills required for nuclear power. How half life plays into that, why nuclear accidents were taken out of scope, and why you don't want an old italian geothermal complex in your backyard. As i said, any TLDR i can give will not do justice to the details and quality of the report.
I wrote my comment to put your original comment [1] in proportion.
You appear to have since edited your original comment to replace "Carbon-14" with a broader non specific "radioactive waste".
> the "compared to cosmic rays" reminds me of the fuel industry claiming that atmospheric lead is natural
It might remind you of that but I assure the intent was to legitimately compare the actual amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere (which originates from cosmic ray collisions) against the additional amount added by PWR + BWR reactors.
Reactors add very little by magnitude to an amount that is already very small and in toto the effect on humans is a very small part of the "normal" human exposure to environmental radiation that has persisted for our time on this planet.
> there is natural radon-222 as well, does that mean the radon exhaust of coal power plants can be ignored ..
Absolutely not, but for a meaningful understanding it should be compared to the already occurring creation of radon from 'natural' uranium decaying within granites and expressing to the surface.
I'd suggest paying attention to ground topography also - radon pools in valleys until stiff breezes clear them of those pools - hence the recommendations for venting in basements in granite rich areas.
> This hides a lot of details, ... will not do justice to details and quality of the source.
If it's hiding details you can find better sources that drill deeper in the individual components.
Eg: Australian AGSO and National Pollution Inventory reports on Olympic Dam [2] and other "uranium mills".
Water usage might be an issue of greater significance there (at Olympic Dam).
> You appear to have since edited your original comment to replace "Carbon-14" with a broader non specific "radioactive waste".
i did, within minutes of posting it, and before ever knowing about your follow up response, because i was unhappy with pinpointing such a detail and wanted to avoid this exact situation of someone over-focusing on that specific detail, disregarding the larger context of comparing whole sectors. I take full responsibility for pointing at the cherry you picked, before realising i should not.
> Water usage might be an issue of greater significance there (at Olympic Dam).
Then you may be happy to hear that the UN report also notes water pollution by the nuclear industry, citing a publication by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency as reference L2 concerning Olympic Dam
The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation cares, you can read about it in their 2016 Report to the General Assembly, Scientific Annex B, chapter V, including a comparison of different energy generation technologies in chapter VIII
There is with renewables which are massively being built out. So far they completely replaced nuclear while also reducing coal power production from 45% in 2013 to 24% in 2020. By law there will be no more coal power in 2038, although 2030 or earlier is a more realistic date because of rising costs.
Germany is actually ideal for maximizing renewables because of the 12 interconnects to other electrical grids, along with their ~10GW hydro storage and ~5GW hydro. It should only take another few tens of GW to phase coal out.
I made the argument earlier[1] that if climate change was a global institution friendly way to talk about oil production failing to grow any more and possibly falling causing catastrophic effects on human civilization that all sectors of society would need to prepare for, that carbon capture efforts would be token only and coal would be the big mega winner.
Now we see that India and China seem to be increasing their coal production as fast as they can [2] and now Germany is doing likewise.
