6 ms·

Exactly ! If the problem is Climate Change (and thus CO_2 production), why would you, in your sane mind, shut down nuclear power ? It's the best method to produ

by Faaak 7y ago

Exactly ! If the problem is Climate Change (and thus CO_2 production), why would you, in your sane mind, shut down nuclear power ? It's the best method to produce electricity with the less grams of CO2 per kwh..

k__ 7y ago
Isn't this more about self-sufficiently powering the country? I mean, Germany would have to buy uranium.
- ben_bai 7y ago
  We need to buy coal and gas also. Closed down all the coal mines, and coal is the only resource Germany has in its territory. We are very dependent at the moment. We are at 46% renewable energy, but without proper storage that's just a sad book-keeping trick.
  - lispm 7y ago
    Currently there is not much reason to store electricity in large amounts, since there is not that much surplus electricity in Germany. Storage will become relevant after 2030 or later. Means we are still in the stages of R&D and planning.
    - usrusr 7y ago
      R&D remains just R forever if you postpone deployment until R&D is "done", whatever that means. As a lone consumer you can let others be early adopters, but this approach is not applicable to the national economic policy level. None of the progress in renewables we saw in the last three decades would have happened with only research spending, no matter how generous. Funding research is important and immensely helpful compared to not funding research, but it can only get you so far. Germany has been neglecting storage with the argument "but we don't need it yet" for far too long already and is already starting to suffer chicken/egg problems as a consequence. "Why build more renewables if we can't store the energy anyways" is heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists.
      - lispm 7y ago
        There is simply no need for mass deployment, yet. We would waste a lot of money. If there are business models, which make the existing storage profitable, then it gets viable. For example near my home town there is a pumped hydro storage facility, which the last years struggled economically. It's also useful to distribute electricity over several countries via a grid designed to do so - something which starts for countries around the North Sea. It's not that nothing is done. For example North Germany builds a 1.4 GW HVDC line to Norway (called NordLink) to be able to store and retrieve electricity from&to there. Additional lines can be added, and at least one is in the planning stage (called NordGer). One of these lines costs 2 billion Euros to be build. We are also far away from having infrastructure to use electrical vehicles as a grid component - there are simply also not yet enough of these vehicles. Recycled batteries from these vehicles could be used in homes. There is a compressed air power plant running for decades. There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity. There are first deployments of storage systems using heat, in the industry. I would expect that more storage variants and mass deployment will start in a decade, once we reach interesting levels of cheap surplus electricity, there is large scale demand for stored electricity, and when there are viable business models. > heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists I would not invest billions into storage deployment, just because populists are unhappy.
        usrusr 7y ago
        > There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity. Only with power to gas conversion capacity. Which is exactly what this project is trying to ramp up to practicality. "You should not do X because you could do X instead" isn't a very compelling argument.
        lispm 7y ago
        There are a bunch of power-to-gas projects. It's already being done. But there is very little experience on a large scale industrial level. We are just starting to work on that. https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/energiewende-peter-altmaier-will-globale-vorreiterrolle-bei-co2-freiem-wasserstoff-a-f05471a8-620e-4e05-970c-bf609aee0ae0 https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/energiewende-pete... > Bis 2030 sollen 20 Prozent des in Deutschland verbrauchten Wasserstoffes aus nachhaltigen Quellen wie Wind- und Solarkraft stammen. In 2030, 20% of the Hydrogen used in Germany should come from renewable sources...
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first. There is still uranium in the Ore mountains. The USSR and GDR were mining it.
  - lispm 7y ago
    > Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first. The mines are closed. Germany is currently investing billions to clean up the Uranium mines. Wismut might have cost then around 8 billion Euro. The technical and environmental standards of the USSR and the GDR were rather poor. Left is some Uranium, which too costly to mine and not competitive in any way with the world market.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Germany is a rich country. It can afford to import things.
ben_bai 7y ago
Because the anti-nuclear mindset is too strong in Germany. We are still affected from the Chernobyl disaster (still can't eat wild boar, still can't eat mushrooms from certain areas). The nuclear waste problem is also not solved and extremely expensive. Then there is politics: Nuclear plants lifetime was extended, then Fukushima happened and "overnight" lots of old plants were shut down. Germany is at 14% nuclear, 30% coal (even though all national coal mines have closed), 10% gas, 46% renewable (wind, solar, bio-gas, water, all without proper energy storage)
- the8472 7y ago
  > even though all national coal mines have closed If only. It's just hard coal mines that were closed. Lignite is still being open-pit mined.
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Wow wait where can't you eat mushrooms from? This is new to me as a European.
  - martinald 7y ago
    I've never heard that either. Can't be correct.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      "I've never heard of it, so it can't be true" is a terrifyingly bad standard to set. https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush... > As a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident, certain species of mushrooms and wild game are still highly contaminated with caesium-137 in some areas of Germany.
      - martinald 7y ago
        Highly contaminated is a strong word. You'd have to eat 20kg+ of those mushrooms according to that article to reach your annual recommended amount of radition for the year. Considering how long it would take to pick 20kg of wild mushrooms I think you would be at it for a while. Bananas are also radioactive - those mushrooms maybe an order or two of magnitude more.
lnsp 7y ago
It's way more expensive than coal, wind or solar. And since the German government doesn't seem to subsidize anything except coal, nuclear has no chance.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  An already up and running nuclear power station is not at all that expensive.
  - the8472 7y ago
    They are uninsurable, which means if someone actually had to pay for the insurance their price would be astronomical.
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      The fact that they've been running for decades is hard to explain if that's true.
      - lispm 7y ago
        Risks had not been factored in as likely (like in Japan the authorities have demanded protection against earth quakes and tsunamis, but only to a certain level and they were surprised to learn that over the lifetime of these plans stronger events happen than anticipated) and if anything happens, the companies are simply not insured - other than via the government, which had created the demand and the environment for these reactors. The companies are also not well prepared if larger accidents happen. Example: Many old reactors never were designed to withstand an impact of a large passenger airplane. Large passenger airplanes don't fly into buildings. Right? Well, we have learned in the meantime that this scenario is not that unlikely, since 9/11 and for example the Lufthansa/Germanwings pilot, which flew an Airbus into the ground in France killing all passengers on board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 One could now just let these old reactors run. What to do with the risk? Well, set up military systems to shoot down aircrafts approaching a reactor site? Adding more concrete as a protection? I'd guess that there were some clever people exploring the options and in the end its just to costly to do something working...
Tade0 7y ago
If you account for waste disposal it becomes prohibitively expensive. In 2016 the largest German utilities agreed to pay €23.6bln so that it would be the government's problem to deal with the waste: https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-deal-with-energy-companies/a-36089376 https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d... Decommissioning all the (23) plants still active in 2016 will eventually cost another €24bln. All in all €2bln per plant. And this is just the lower bound. It's hard to tell how much safely storing this waste will cost over the next several decades. I remember this from my German lessons in school. Managing radioactive waste is simply too troublesome.

by Faaak 7y ago

k__ 7y ago

Isn't this more about self-sufficiently powering the country? I mean, Germany would have to buy uranium.

ben_bai 7y ago
We need to buy coal and gas also. Closed down all the coal mines, and coal is the only resource Germany has in its territory. We are very dependent at the moment. We are at 46% renewable energy, but without proper storage that's just a sad book-keeping trick.
- lispm 7y ago
  Currently there is not much reason to store electricity in large amounts, since there is not that much surplus electricity in Germany. Storage will become relevant after 2030 or later. Means we are still in the stages of R&D and planning.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    R&D remains just R forever if you postpone deployment until R&D is "done", whatever that means. As a lone consumer you can let others be early adopters, but this approach is not applicable to the national economic policy level. None of the progress in renewables we saw in the last three decades would have happened with only research spending, no matter how generous. Funding research is important and immensely helpful compared to not funding research, but it can only get you so far. Germany has been neglecting storage with the argument "but we don't need it yet" for far too long already and is already starting to suffer chicken/egg problems as a consequence. "Why build more renewables if we can't store the energy anyways" is heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists.
    - lispm 7y ago
      There is simply no need for mass deployment, yet. We would waste a lot of money. If there are business models, which make the existing storage profitable, then it gets viable. For example near my home town there is a pumped hydro storage facility, which the last years struggled economically. It's also useful to distribute electricity over several countries via a grid designed to do so - something which starts for countries around the North Sea. It's not that nothing is done. For example North Germany builds a 1.4 GW HVDC line to Norway (called NordLink) to be able to store and retrieve electricity from&to there. Additional lines can be added, and at least one is in the planning stage (called NordGer). One of these lines costs 2 billion Euros to be build. We are also far away from having infrastructure to use electrical vehicles as a grid component - there are simply also not yet enough of these vehicles. Recycled batteries from these vehicles could be used in homes. There is a compressed air power plant running for decades. There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity. There are first deployments of storage systems using heat, in the industry. I would expect that more storage variants and mass deployment will start in a decade, once we reach interesting levels of cheap surplus electricity, there is large scale demand for stored electricity, and when there are viable business models. > heard quite a lot from anti-renewable populists I would not invest billions into storage deployment, just because populists are unhappy.
      - usrusr 7y ago
        > There are large gas storage systems, which could store gas produced from surplus electricity. Only with power to gas conversion capacity. Which is exactly what this project is trying to ramp up to practicality. "You should not do X because you could do X instead" isn't a very compelling argument.
        lispm 7y ago
        There are a bunch of power-to-gas projects. It's already being done. But there is very little experience on a large scale industrial level. We are just starting to work on that. https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/energiewende-peter-altmaier-will-globale-vorreiterrolle-bei-co2-freiem-wasserstoff-a-f05471a8-620e-4e05-970c-bf609aee0ae0 https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/energiewende-pete... > Bis 2030 sollen 20 Prozent des in Deutschland verbrauchten Wasserstoffes aus nachhaltigen Quellen wie Wind- und Solarkraft stammen. In 2030, 20% of the Hydrogen used in Germany should come from renewable sources...
ahartmetz 7y ago
Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first. There is still uranium in the Ore mountains. The USSR and GDR were mining it.
- lispm 7y ago
  > Germany would probably not have to buy uranium at first. The mines are closed. Germany is currently investing billions to clean up the Uranium mines. Wismut might have cost then around 8 billion Euro. The technical and environmental standards of the USSR and the GDR were rather poor. Left is some Uranium, which too costly to mine and not competitive in any way with the world market.
BurningFrog 7y ago
Germany is a rich country. It can afford to import things.

ben_bai 7y ago

Because the anti-nuclear mindset is too strong in Germany. We are still affected from the Chernobyl disaster (still can't eat wild boar, still can't eat mushrooms from certain areas). The nuclear waste problem is also not solved and extremely expensive. Then there is politics: Nuclear plants lifetime was extended, then Fukushima happened and "overnight" lots of old plants were shut down. Germany is at 14% nuclear, 30% coal (even though all national coal mines have closed), 10% gas, 46% renewable (wind, solar, bio-gas, water, all without proper energy storage)

the8472 7y ago
> even though all national coal mines have closed If only. It's just hard coal mines that were closed. Lignite is still being open-pit mined.
H8crilA 7y ago
Wow wait where can't you eat mushrooms from? This is new to me as a European.
- martinald 7y ago
  I've never heard that either. Can't be correct.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    "I've never heard of it, so it can't be true" is a terrifyingly bad standard to set. https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mushrooms-game/mushrooms-game_node.html https://www.bfs.de/EN/topics/ion/environment/foodstuffs/mush... > As a result of the Chernobyl reactor accident, certain species of mushrooms and wild game are still highly contaminated with caesium-137 in some areas of Germany.
    - martinald 7y ago
      Highly contaminated is a strong word. You'd have to eat 20kg+ of those mushrooms according to that article to reach your annual recommended amount of radition for the year. Considering how long it would take to pick 20kg of wild mushrooms I think you would be at it for a while. Bananas are also radioactive - those mushrooms maybe an order or two of magnitude more.

lnsp 7y ago

It's way more expensive than coal, wind or solar. And since the German government doesn't seem to subsidize anything except coal, nuclear has no chance.

BurningFrog 7y ago
An already up and running nuclear power station is not at all that expensive.
- the8472 7y ago
  They are uninsurable, which means if someone actually had to pay for the insurance their price would be astronomical.
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    The fact that they've been running for decades is hard to explain if that's true.
    - lispm 7y ago
      Risks had not been factored in as likely (like in Japan the authorities have demanded protection against earth quakes and tsunamis, but only to a certain level and they were surprised to learn that over the lifetime of these plans stronger events happen than anticipated) and if anything happens, the companies are simply not insured - other than via the government, which had created the demand and the environment for these reactors. The companies are also not well prepared if larger accidents happen. Example: Many old reactors never were designed to withstand an impact of a large passenger airplane. Large passenger airplanes don't fly into buildings. Right? Well, we have learned in the meantime that this scenario is not that unlikely, since 9/11 and for example the Lufthansa/Germanwings pilot, which flew an Airbus into the ground in France killing all passengers on board. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525 One could now just let these old reactors run. What to do with the risk? Well, set up military systems to shoot down aircrafts approaching a reactor site? Adding more concrete as a protection? I'd guess that there were some clever people exploring the options and in the end its just to costly to do something working...

Tade0 7y ago

If you account for waste disposal it becomes prohibitively expensive. In 2016 the largest German utilities agreed to pay €23.6bln so that it would be the government's problem to deal with the waste: https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-deal-with-energy-companies/a-36089376 https://www.dw.com/en/german-government-does-nuclear-waste-d... Decommissioning all the (23) plants still active in 2016 will eventually cost another €24bln. All in all €2bln per plant. And this is just the lower bound. It's hard to tell how much safely storing this waste will cost over the next several decades. I remember this from my German lessons in school. Managing radioactive waste is simply too troublesome.