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I am german myself and I am frustrated about this countries hate for nuclear power. In the wake of Fukushima, they shut down 12 perfectly modern nuclear power p

I am german myself and I am frustrated about this countries hate for nuclear power. In the wake of Fukushima, they shut down 12 perfectly modern nuclear power plants to rely on coal until green power can take over. We are quite behind on that too. 2038 to end coal also seems to be a quite conservative goal, but until now the government was great at missing even the most conservative goals on basically anything.

lispm 8y ago
The nuclear reactors were actually not 'perfectly modern'. > government was great at missing even the most conservative goals on basically anything The share of electricity from renewable energy has surpassed any goals so far.
- woodpanel 8y ago
  You mind sharing your data? AFAIK what proponents of the German „Energiewende“ are often referring to are sometimes just superficial headlines or positive datapoints cherry picked out of a study that itself draws negative conclusions or fails to come to a postive result. The most prominent in the last years were those PR stunts, that claimed Germany is exporting more energy than it is consuming. Which frankly adds injury to insult. Because the only reason Germany is doing that is that otherwise its energy grid would collapse. Renewables (in Germany) produce energy in fluctuating rates and aren‘t suited to serve the base load. Excess energy can’t be saved so it has to be (by law) dumped somewhere, which usually means our neighbor countries. They in return, being annoyed by repeatedly having their grid brought on the brink of collapse by us started to install equipment on their borders to basically „emergency stop“ these shenanigans and cut-off our grid if they have to. Apart from the diplomatic „upside“ another side-effect said PR stunt is spin-doctoring is the fact that everytime we have to dump energy the prices go down. They even go negative. That sounds nice, but none of the German consumers will get these prices on their energy bill (if they did, they might increase consumption in those times, alleviating the grid’s pain...). It effectively means, that Germany pays other countries to take their (heavily tax-payer funded) excess energy. Which alas, gives us said PR stunt. Anyways, I honestly would be interested in your data that proves the „surpassing [of] any goals so far“.
  - lispm 8y ago
    > that claimed Germany is exporting more energy than it is consuming No one claims that. What is claimed and what is actually correct is that Germany exports more electricity than it imports. > They in return, being annoyed by repeatedly having their grid brought on the brink of collapse Contrary to popular myths the German electricity grid is one of the most stable in the world. https://energyathaas.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gt.jpg https://energyathaas.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gt.jpg > Excess energy can’t be saved There isn't much excess electricity from renewable energy. What we have are is a situation where coal / nuclear are exporting their electricity and are not willing or able to reduce their energy production enough. Note also exporting and importing electricity is nothing bad. We will see much more electricity exchange in the coming decades within the EU. The reason is that the EU is pushing an EU-wide electricity market with competition and wants to get rid of country-local closed energy markets with monopolies or oligopolies. Better adjust to that. > but none of the German consumers will get these prices on their energy bill Check out industry prices - they are consumers of electricity, too. > surpass any goalsso far Example, published in 2012: http://www.renewable-energy-concepts.com/fileadmin/user_upload/download-infos/broschuere_ee_zahlen_2011.pdf http://www.renewable-energy-concepts.com/fileadmin/user_uplo... It says: 'Bis spätestens zum Jahr 2020 soll der Anteil der erneuerbaren Energien an der Stromversorgung mindestens 35 Prozent betragen.' This has already happened in 2018.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - woodpanel 8y ago
      Sorry for getting the wrong impression of you, but why are you showcasing your answer as profound by dividing my post into separate quotes and sprinkling your answers with links that lead to anything but "data"? Your first link is just one jpg of a table on a blog of a progressive institute. The second one just a broad publication in German by the the German environmental ministry. Should I refer to its imprint as proof? Then you make un-based broad statements and label critics as adherents to mythical beliefs > Contrary to popular myths the German electricity grid is one of the most stable in the world. To which I'd say, look no further than 10 January 2019 when Germany's policy of legally enforcing right of way for renewable energies almost brought down the whole of Europe's electricity grid. [1] Furthermore the whole year of 2003 the German energy net authority had to perform 2 redispatches to avert a blackout. 2010 they had to perform 290, while in 2017 third quarter alone they had to perform 1.013 [2] No one claims [that Germany is exporting more energy than it is consuming]. What is claimed and what is actually correct is that Germany exports more electricity than it imports. Thats a non sequitur. > This has already happened in 2018. Clearly, your statement of the surpassing of "any goals so far" can't be based on that one data point out of a 140 page document? Or does this mean this was the only goal of the Energiewende? ? [1] https://derstandard.at/2000096185439/Europas-Stromnetz-stand-am-Rande-des-Totalausfalls https://derstandard.at/2000096185439/Europas-Stromnetz-stand... [2] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Allgemeines/Bundesnetzagentur/Publikationen/Berichte/2017/Quartalsbericht_Q2_Q3_2017.pdf;jsessionid=F9FA1E72A7D8020CAB2E30F894F6EA97?__blob=publicationFile&v=3 https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/All... (page 32)
oska 8y ago
Quote from "The myth of the dark side of Germany’s Energiewende" [1] : The narrative of Germany’s dirty Energiewende rests on the idea that renewables could not live up to their promise to fill the gap of retiring nuclear reactors. Consequently, that gap needed to be closed by power generation from coal. But if we look at the figures we get quite a different picture. The yellow line in Figure 2 above depicts how the amount of electricity from nuclear declined from 2000 to 2014. Due to the decommissioning of old plants, nuclear power had been declining steadily. When the German government decided on the phase-out, in 2011, some nuclear power stations were shut down immediately and the output went down more quickly. Afterwards, the steady decline continued once more. The green line shows the steady rise of renewable energy in the same period. In 2011, more electric energy was provided from renewable sources than from all nuclear facilities. In 2014, renewables achieved a share of approximately 29% in total electricity generation. So renewables have substituted the falling nuclear production in terms of total annual power generation and are very likely to continue doing so until 2022 when the last nuclear plant will be shut down. [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-myth-of-the-dark-side-of-germanys-energiewende-94542/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-myth-of-the-dark-side-of-ger... (I would encourage you to read the whole thing).
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  I would encourage one to not read this link. I was waiting to get to the place in the article where they acknowledge that Germany could have kept their 50 TWh of nuclear online and cut coal by the same amount - a reduction of 20% - but I guess that wouldn't fit in to the narrative they're trying to spin, because they completely ignored der Elefant in das Zimmer.
  - oska 8y ago
    The point well made later in the article is that even if they had kept their nuclear plants running, coal would still have increased in 2012 and 2013 because in those years energy production from coal was very profitable and Germany has a ready export market to sell it to. Irregardless that domestic energy consumption actually trended down in those years. > Both effects – the drop in coal and CO2 allowance prices – have made coal an extremely profitable fuel for power generation. Notably, both developments happened in 2011, the year of the nuclear phase-out.
api 8y ago
Why is there such a huge difference between France and Germany on this issue?
- 9dev 8y ago
  Why is there such a big difference between California and Texas on the issue of immigration?
- odiroot 8y ago
  Stronger centralised power? More influential middle-of-the-spectrum political parties?
- hussong 8y ago
  France and Germany have had very different energy strategies for ages. Germany still has significant domestic coal reserves. France pretty much ran out of coal decades ago and therefore invested heavily in nuclear technology and access to uranium ore (mostly in Africa), they are #2 in uranium consumption worldwide.
  - api 8y ago
    I suspect running out of coal nails it. Economics tends to drive politics. There was also probably a little thing in France about being dependent on Germany.
anovikov 8y ago
Well you aren't behind on the green power. As far as i have checked, in 2011 when the reactors were shut down, the plan was to get to 35% of renewable power by 2020, revised up to 40% somewhere around 2014 or 2015, and you got there in 2018. 50% was planned for 2030 already and is clearly going to happen way sooner than that.
amai 8y ago
I'm also german and I want to see a solution for the nuclear waste problem first, before we use nuclear power again. Until we have that solution I'm in favor of nuclear power only on the surface of the sun!
- RealityVoid 8y ago
  I personally fail to see a solution to the coal waste problem. This gets swept under the rug most of the times, whereas nuclear waste is at least accounted for. Nuclear waste, according to my understanding, is more of a political problem rather than a technical one. As was the closure of nuclear power plants in Germany.
  - amai 8y ago
    What is the coal waste problem and how is this comparable to the problem of nuclear waste? Nuclear waste is a technical problem, otherwise it would have been solved already. There are countries like France where they have 80% of their electricity generated by nuclear power and politics is absolutely pro-nuclear. Yet, they don't have a solution to the nuclear waste problem.
- dralley 8y ago
  It's a political problem, not a technological problem. We have the ability to use waste to fuel fast-neutron reactors, which not only reduces the amount of waste but makes it less difficult to deal with. The problem is that one output of these reactors would be plutonium, and due to anti-proliferation treaties it opens up a political can of worms.
  - amai 8y ago
    This solution has been tried for a long time and it didn't work either: "In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries". In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion

lispm 8y ago

The nuclear reactors were actually not 'perfectly modern'. > government was great at missing even the most conservative goals on basically anything The share of electricity from renewable energy has surpassed any goals so far.

woodpanel 8y ago
You mind sharing your data? AFAIK what proponents of the German „Energiewende“ are often referring to are sometimes just superficial headlines or positive datapoints cherry picked out of a study that itself draws negative conclusions or fails to come to a postive result. The most prominent in the last years were those PR stunts, that claimed Germany is exporting more energy than it is consuming. Which frankly adds injury to insult. Because the only reason Germany is doing that is that otherwise its energy grid would collapse. Renewables (in Germany) produce energy in fluctuating rates and aren‘t suited to serve the base load. Excess energy can’t be saved so it has to be (by law) dumped somewhere, which usually means our neighbor countries. They in return, being annoyed by repeatedly having their grid brought on the brink of collapse by us started to install equipment on their borders to basically „emergency stop“ these shenanigans and cut-off our grid if they have to. Apart from the diplomatic „upside“ another side-effect said PR stunt is spin-doctoring is the fact that everytime we have to dump energy the prices go down. They even go negative. That sounds nice, but none of the German consumers will get these prices on their energy bill (if they did, they might increase consumption in those times, alleviating the grid’s pain...). It effectively means, that Germany pays other countries to take their (heavily tax-payer funded) excess energy. Which alas, gives us said PR stunt. Anyways, I honestly would be interested in your data that proves the „surpassing [of] any goals so far“.
- lispm 8y ago
  > that claimed Germany is exporting more energy than it is consuming No one claims that. What is claimed and what is actually correct is that Germany exports more electricity than it imports. > They in return, being annoyed by repeatedly having their grid brought on the brink of collapse Contrary to popular myths the German electricity grid is one of the most stable in the world. https://energyathaas.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gt.jpg https://energyathaas.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/gt.jpg > Excess energy can’t be saved There isn't much excess electricity from renewable energy. What we have are is a situation where coal / nuclear are exporting their electricity and are not willing or able to reduce their energy production enough. Note also exporting and importing electricity is nothing bad. We will see much more electricity exchange in the coming decades within the EU. The reason is that the EU is pushing an EU-wide electricity market with competition and wants to get rid of country-local closed energy markets with monopolies or oligopolies. Better adjust to that. > but none of the German consumers will get these prices on their energy bill Check out industry prices - they are consumers of electricity, too. > surpass any goalsso far Example, published in 2012: http://www.renewable-energy-concepts.com/fileadmin/user_upload/download-infos/broschuere_ee_zahlen_2011.pdf http://www.renewable-energy-concepts.com/fileadmin/user_uplo... It says: 'Bis spätestens zum Jahr 2020 soll der Anteil der erneuerbaren Energien an der Stromversorgung mindestens 35 Prozent betragen.' This has already happened in 2018.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - woodpanel 8y ago
    Sorry for getting the wrong impression of you, but why are you showcasing your answer as profound by dividing my post into separate quotes and sprinkling your answers with links that lead to anything but "data"? Your first link is just one jpg of a table on a blog of a progressive institute. The second one just a broad publication in German by the the German environmental ministry. Should I refer to its imprint as proof? Then you make un-based broad statements and label critics as adherents to mythical beliefs > Contrary to popular myths the German electricity grid is one of the most stable in the world. To which I'd say, look no further than 10 January 2019 when Germany's policy of legally enforcing right of way for renewable energies almost brought down the whole of Europe's electricity grid. [1] Furthermore the whole year of 2003 the German energy net authority had to perform 2 redispatches to avert a blackout. 2010 they had to perform 290, while in 2017 third quarter alone they had to perform 1.013 [2] No one claims [that Germany is exporting more energy than it is consuming]. What is claimed and what is actually correct is that Germany exports more electricity than it imports. Thats a non sequitur. > This has already happened in 2018. Clearly, your statement of the surpassing of "any goals so far" can't be based on that one data point out of a 140 page document? Or does this mean this was the only goal of the Energiewende? ? [1] https://derstandard.at/2000096185439/Europas-Stromnetz-stand-am-Rande-des-Totalausfalls https://derstandard.at/2000096185439/Europas-Stromnetz-stand... [2] https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Allgemeines/Bundesnetzagentur/Publikationen/Berichte/2017/Quartalsbericht_Q2_Q3_2017.pdf;jsessionid=F9FA1E72A7D8020CAB2E30F894F6EA97?__blob=publicationFile&v=3 https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/All... (page 32)

oska 8y ago

Quote from "The myth of the dark side of Germany’s Energiewende" [1] : The narrative of Germany’s dirty Energiewende rests on the idea that renewables could not live up to their promise to fill the gap of retiring nuclear reactors. Consequently, that gap needed to be closed by power generation from coal. But if we look at the figures we get quite a different picture. The yellow line in Figure 2 above depicts how the amount of electricity from nuclear declined from 2000 to 2014. Due to the decommissioning of old plants, nuclear power had been declining steadily. When the German government decided on the phase-out, in 2011, some nuclear power stations were shut down immediately and the output went down more quickly. Afterwards, the steady decline continued once more. The green line shows the steady rise of renewable energy in the same period. In 2011, more electric energy was provided from renewable sources than from all nuclear facilities. In 2014, renewables achieved a share of approximately 29% in total electricity generation. So renewables have substituted the falling nuclear production in terms of total annual power generation and are very likely to continue doing so until 2022 when the last nuclear plant will be shut down. [1] https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-myth-of-the-dark-side-of-germanys-energiewende-94542/ https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-myth-of-the-dark-side-of-ger... (I would encourage you to read the whole thing).

reitzensteinm 8y ago
I would encourage one to not read this link. I was waiting to get to the place in the article where they acknowledge that Germany could have kept their 50 TWh of nuclear online and cut coal by the same amount - a reduction of 20% - but I guess that wouldn't fit in to the narrative they're trying to spin, because they completely ignored der Elefant in das Zimmer.
- oska 8y ago
  The point well made later in the article is that even if they had kept their nuclear plants running, coal would still have increased in 2012 and 2013 because in those years energy production from coal was very profitable and Germany has a ready export market to sell it to. Irregardless that domestic energy consumption actually trended down in those years. > Both effects – the drop in coal and CO2 allowance prices – have made coal an extremely profitable fuel for power generation. Notably, both developments happened in 2011, the year of the nuclear phase-out.

api 8y ago

Why is there such a huge difference between France and Germany on this issue?

9dev 8y ago
Why is there such a big difference between California and Texas on the issue of immigration?
odiroot 8y ago
Stronger centralised power? More influential middle-of-the-spectrum political parties?
hussong 8y ago
France and Germany have had very different energy strategies for ages. Germany still has significant domestic coal reserves. France pretty much ran out of coal decades ago and therefore invested heavily in nuclear technology and access to uranium ore (mostly in Africa), they are #2 in uranium consumption worldwide.
- api 8y ago
  I suspect running out of coal nails it. Economics tends to drive politics. There was also probably a little thing in France about being dependent on Germany.

anovikov 8y ago

Well you aren't behind on the green power. As far as i have checked, in 2011 when the reactors were shut down, the plan was to get to 35% of renewable power by 2020, revised up to 40% somewhere around 2014 or 2015, and you got there in 2018. 50% was planned for 2030 already and is clearly going to happen way sooner than that.

amai 8y ago

I'm also german and I want to see a solution for the nuclear waste problem first, before we use nuclear power again. Until we have that solution I'm in favor of nuclear power only on the surface of the sun!

RealityVoid 8y ago
I personally fail to see a solution to the coal waste problem. This gets swept under the rug most of the times, whereas nuclear waste is at least accounted for. Nuclear waste, according to my understanding, is more of a political problem rather than a technical one. As was the closure of nuclear power plants in Germany.
- amai 8y ago
  What is the coal waste problem and how is this comparable to the problem of nuclear waste? Nuclear waste is a technical problem, otherwise it would have been solved already. There are countries like France where they have 80% of their electricity generated by nuclear power and politics is absolutely pro-nuclear. Yet, they don't have a solution to the nuclear waste problem.
dralley 8y ago
It's a political problem, not a technological problem. We have the ability to use waste to fuel fast-neutron reactors, which not only reduces the amount of waste but makes it less difficult to deal with. The problem is that one output of these reactors would be plutonium, and due to anti-proliferation treaties it opens up a political can of worms.
- amai 8y ago
  This solution has been tried for a long time and it didn't work either: "In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries". In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion