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Progress has been limited on Germany's shift from nuclear to renewables
- jseliger 8y agoGermany and California could already have near-zero greenhouse gas emissions from power production: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11/had-they-bet-on-nuclear-not-renewables-germany-california-would-already-have-100-clean-power https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/09/11.... The technology already exists. The problems are chiefly political.
- Bombthecat 8y agoStill waiting for an answer what to do with the waste. Beside A) dumping in the ground and hope for the best B) some magic tech will pop which will solve the issue.
- adrianN 8y agoBreeder reactors reduce the waste by more than 95% and leave only isotopes that decay much faster.
- pizza234 8y agoIn 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"
- adrianN 8y agoYou should also cite the reasons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor#Discussion They apparently don't make economic sense since Uranium is cheap, and there is a risk of proliferation. It's not the case that the technology doesn't work.
- Luc 8y agoIt's pretty benign as waste goes. It just sits there and gets less dangerous as time goes on. You could just keep it in a bunker and pay a crew to dust it off and repackage it when needed for the next 1000 years. But no, for some reason it needs to be taken out of the environment, like in the famous Australian sketch...
- pizza234 8y agoI'll be convinced when I'll start to see people campaigning for building storage facilities in their neighbourhoods, rather than generic claims that storage facilities are as safe as it can be.
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoThat's a pretty strange statement. Lots of industrial facilities meet very high standards of safety, say for instance battery and electric vehicle factories, yet we still place them out in the desert? Nobody is campaigning to build those in their neighbourhoods?
- pizza234 7y agoThat was a semi-sarcastic reference to NIMBY. Specifically, I believe that the same people who state that nuclear waste sites are Perfectly Safe™ would actually reject that idea if the potential problems would affect them personally (figuratively, if the site was in their neighbourhood).
- C14L 8y agoAnd, if technology keeps improving, at some point there will be tech to easily recycle all that "waste". Because it still contains energy.
- hef19898 8y agoThey are doing that at Sellafield in the UK. Which is in itself pretty ugly business. EDIT: The business is ugly, not the fact that it is in the UK.
- wil421 8y agoHold it underground until we can do a Futurama and blast it into the sun. /end sarcasm. Didn’t work out well for Futurama.
- ars 8y ago> Still waiting for an answer what to do with the waste. Nuclear fuel reprocessing plus breeder reactors. They burn virtually all of the usable power in uranium leaving little waste behind. It's an economic problem, and an arms control problem, not a technological one.
- imtringued 8y agoHonestly the waste problem isn't significant except in terms of economic costs. In my eyes the problem is that we try to shove all the waste into a single location. Letting 100% of the waste leak into ground water is terrifying but what if it was spread over 100 locations? Well it sucks but at least each location has 1% of the total risk.
- anoncake 8y agoNuclear fission is a safe source of power that sane people support. Ukraine is LARPing the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone for political reasons. We should just build a lot of nuclear reactors somewhere in Germany that's hundreds of kilometers from anything we'd care to lose.
- ivan_gammel 8y agoSomewhere in Germany, but hundreds of kilometers from anything worthy - that can happen only in alternative reality where Hitler won and Siberia is now in Germany.
- b3orn 8y agoI think he's talking about Berlin.
- warmwaffles 8y agoIf factorio has taught me anything, it's that I can just shove it into a steel chest and forget about it.
- hef19898 8y agoBesides the fact that there is no such place anywhere in Germany or Western Europe there actually is point in that argument. Which is the question who should have nuclear power plants as it is impossible to get rid of them. A country like Germany where tight controls can be reinforced or someone else like say Ukraine or Czechy. The other point is that fact that you need the distance in case the plant blows up. Which implies it can blow up. Which is true as well (unsinkable Titanic, tsunami safe Fukushima, you name it) as technology can and will fail.
- anoncake 8y agoCounter-intuitively, one of the less bad places for an NPP might actually be Pripyat. Making the CEZ even more irradiated is better than creating another.
- jhayward 8y agoAnyone using Michael Shellenberger and his faux front for nuclear lobbying is as an authority is participating in a fraud designed to mislead and misinform. Please don't.
- imtringued 8y agoI don't see how that makes sense. How much nuclear does 600 billion € buy you nowadays? 20GW? 40GW? That isn't even anywhere close to the amount of energy Germany needs and the other half would still have to be generated with coal and completely negate any theoretical gains just like it happened with renewables. This crappy situation was caused by government inaction, not by choosing the wrong technology. Germany produces 45% of the energy with nuclear+renewables already but it didn't make a dent in it's CO2 emissions because coal emits 800g of CO2 per kWH and nuclear or renewables at most 12g per kWh (mostly emissions during construction). You know what would help? If they simply switched their natural gas plants instead. Germany would immediately see a 40% reduction in CO2 today (at least in the electricity sector) and since gas plants can do real time load following they wouldn't become obsolete when the renewable percentage rises in the future.
- zavi 8y agoUnacceptable to criticize Germany on HN. Please delete this.
- sctb 8y agoWe just asked you yesterday to please stop stoking nationalistic flamewar. If you won't follow the guidelines and post thoughtfully and informatively we'll ban the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- androidrebel 8y agoI read the article and find nothing in it that I would consider nationalistic or that would stoke a flamewar. Can you please explain what you meant? Thanks
- seren 8y agoSctb is a mod, there is a dead comment he is replying to that is not displayed by default.
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- liminal 8y agoIt's crazy to move from Nuclear to coal for the sake of the environment. Renewables are great when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, but the rest of the time Nuclear is the better choice
- spython 8y agoThere was a radioactive cloud over most of Europe after Chernobyl. It is much harder politically to defend nuclear energy once you lived through that disaster.
- mpweiher 8y agoExcept that that radioactive cloud was much less harmful than reported. And much less harmful than the emissions from our other power sources.
- spython 8y agoThe amount of harm doesn't matter. It's the magnitude of the event that counts. The same with the perceived and real safety of airplanes vs. cars.
- i_am_proteus 8y agoThere's a cloud of particulants from burning coal and oil over most of Europe--- and it has killed orders of magnitude more people than contamination from Chernobyl.
- juped 8y agoEven if radiation is your only concern, coal emissions disperse a lot of radiation into the environment! (Still not very much radiation in absolute terms - but more radiation than the nuclear industry emits.)
- piker 8y ago> more radiation than the nuclear industry emits buried the lede there
- est31 8y agoIt's very popular to criticize the Energiewende as a failure because it apparently failed to reduce CO2 emmissions of the whole country. And of course, it's true that Germany could have had greater reductions if nuclear was kept alive instead of coal. But the Energiewende actually changed Germany. Suddenly everywhere you go you have solar panel farms and many houses have them on their roofs and there are wind turbines. It was a cool time to live in germany to see these projects realized everywhere. They were done in an era where the price of renewables was very high compared to other technologies. The big contribution that Germany has done to the world with the Energiewende is: * demonstrating that an industrialized nation actually can start a gradual transition towards renewables and most importantly * by buying renewables at high prices, helping the manufacturers to get the price of renewables down. I think it's partially thanks to Germany that renewables have become the cheapest form of elecricity generation this fast, with impact observable around the globe! From that second point alone I think the Energiewende should be considered a success. Could it have been better? Sure. Is it perfect? No. Do I like the high energy prices now? No. But I'm definitely glad we had it. Also consider that we here Germany in fact do have a nuclear catastrophy right below our feet in the form of Asse 2.
- y0ghur7_xxx 8y agoI agree with you. Germany did not accomplish it's goal of CO2 emissions reduction, but in the process of trying it did a whole lot of other great things. And I hope we will all learn from the experience Germany made and it will contribute to all of our next efforts.
- hef19898 8y agoThe biggest issue, unintended I assume, is that CO2 certificates are not rare enough (or expensive enough). The result is that coal is actually cheaper than the most modern gas plants. That is based on variable costs, so. In that regard the renewables are basically "free". Which means that renewables are fed in first followed by coal. Which leaves not enough demand for the cleaner and more flexible gas plants. Obviously CO2 emissions go through the roof.
- atupis 8y ago
- geff82 8y agoThe Energiewende is actually one of the reasons I still live in Germany: I want to see how it happens. It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of. And by the way, private energy consumption is heavily taxed (for a good reason), yet energy hungry industries are exempt from it. And they feel the effect: because of the growing effect of the renewable energies, they now pay one of the lowest electricity prices in the world. There are actually good books that explain how all this works, why there are also short term "unsuccessful" years and how about everything will benefit in the end. And, most importantly: why the Energiewende actually enables a comfortable, good life.
- sampo 8y ago> It is stuff that our grandchildren will be proud of. The French can be proud today, consuming electricity with 1/6 of the carbon footprint per kWh, compared to electricity in Germany. And paying half the price, too, compared to what electricity costs in Germany. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1361920916307933 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136192091...
- geff82 8y agoCO2 is not the only thing that counts. One of those "clean" nuclear plants blows up and we can essentially close our countries or all die of cancer.
- jwr 8y agoNuclear plants do not "blow up", at least not the ones that are built after Chernobyl. Please stop spreading FUD.
- geff82 8y agoTell me about it and tell me why they seem to be no alternative.
- choeger 8y agoFukushima did blow up. Saw it live on TV. In fact, anything that creates that much thermal energy in a pressurized environment has a chance to blow up. Fission is a pointless, dirty, expensive technology when it comes to power generation on Earth. It is also not that friendly to the environment once you consider the huge infrastructure you have to operate. But the worst thing is that it is not scalable. Think about exchanging all coal and gas power plants with nuclear reactors, consider the safety and proliferation issues and then tell me that PV with chemical storage is not much simpler solution.
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- BiasRegularizer 8y agoI believe nuclear power is inevitable. Human power consumption has been growing exponentially, at some point renewable energy will not be able to catch up without causing extensive damage to our ecological system. There are finite amount of renewable energy per sqkm on earth, at some point the area required will begin to erode local ecology. Right now nuclear power appears to be the densest form of energy generation. I agree in the short term renewable energy is a great alternative to coal/natural gas.
- anoncake 7y ago> Human power consumption has been growing exponentially That has to stop. Power generation cannot grow exponentially forever
- yourMadness 8y agoFor those of you that want to see the data behind this story: https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=all-sources&p... I think the history is one of a failed economic subsidy program that accidentally accelerated the PV-industry by a few years. There were several growing PV manufacturers in germany up to around 2011/2012. In that timeframe the manufacturers were all busy building new factories, but the government noticed that the subsidy program became large enough to be expensive and suddenly severely cut the subsidies. None of the manufacturers survived that, the remains were sold to the chinese.
- jplayer01 8y agoYeah, the Energiewende is an absolute farce. The government exited nuclear while utterly gutting the German PV industry. It's mind-boggling.
- cygx 8y agoSome relevant numbers (TWh) from that graphic: 2002 2018 Total 503 545 Coal + Oil 253 205 Gas 40 44 Nuclear 156 72
- jhayward 8y agoSo, they've successfully got rid of about 50% of nuclear and 20% of coal by adding a very small amount of gas generation. Presumably the rest is coming from renewables. Sounds like a pretty good progress report.
- cygx 8y agoPresumably the rest is coming from renewables. No reason not to complete the picture, I guess: 2002 2018 Total 503 545 Coal+Oil 253 205 Nuclear 156 72 Gas 40 44 Biomass 4 45 Wind+Solar+Hydro 39 177 Other 10 3
- golemiprague 8y ago"Like the Netherlands... no more cars with internal combustion engines will be licensed." Doesn't make sense, what are they going to use? only Teslas? I think the whole environment debacle needs a new thinking, less religious and more practical. We don't have unlimited resources to invest in solving those problems, so stop demonising fossil fuels, they are still the force that gives us our energetic freedom. Use the economical advantage and cheap cost to solve the problem step by step rather than declaring unattainable grand targets.
- tim333 8y agoI've always thought it would be more efficient to use a market system with something like a carbon tax and charges for other externalities rather than ad hoc policies for this and that.
- HocusLocus 8y agoNuclear or nothing, because with nuclear you need nothing else.
- anoncake 7y agoExcept for a few spare cities for when the ones you have are made uninhabitable by a nuclear accident.