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> but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal. There was a minor uptick in coal usage for a few years, howev
by hannob 10y ago
> but my understanding was that the closing of nuclear plants post-Fukushima was covered by coal.
There was a minor uptick in coal usage for a few years, however even that wasn't necessary, but due to bad policy (gas plants were standing still at the same time). By now coal usage is going down again.
There were a couple of new constructions of coal plants, but all of them were started before the nuclear phaseout. And by now most of their operators recognize that their investments were failures and will probably never pay out.
It isn't all ideal in Germany, but overall it's going into the right direction (and the success of solar in many countries these days wouldn't have been possible without the early investments in Germany that brought the prices down).
- vidarh 10y agoAnd without the decommissioning, vast amounts of money spent on the decommissioning could have been spent on renewables to replace coal instead, and far less coal would have still been necessary in order to compensate for the decommissioned capacity. It also meant less capacity available for export to countries whose fallback is fossil fuels from elsewhere. The German decommissioning alone is likely to have been a far greater public health disaster than all nuclear incidents in human history combined many times over.