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There's a bit of a backlash again shutting down right now. Fingers crossed Germany doesn't get what it wants for the EU for a change, and that pans out. (Editt

There's a bit of a backlash again shutting down right now. Fingers crossed Germany doesn't get what it wants for the EU for a change, and that pans out. (Editted to make clear I meant EU wide, not within Germany)

patall 5y ago
The last nuclear power plant in Germany will get shutdown in less than 15 months. With that in mind, there have been no investments into them for years. You won't be able to keep them running by simple maintenance. That ship has sailed for years. What do you expect to happen?
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  A big issue is that Germany, in trying to classify gas but not nuclear as "green", is trying to get every other country to do the same. The insanity must at least be stopped at Germany's boarders.
wongarsu 5y ago
A couple years of worse prices from phasing coal out more quickly seem like nothing compared to the long term effects of climate change. If we're taking about nuclear: I don't see any chance of Germany halting its phase-out of current nuclear plants. New plants meanwhile don't seem sensible economically
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  The first step I think is making nuclear count as "green" for the the EU subsidies, and natural gas not. Even if no one builds nukes with that plan, then at least all the green parties will be having more public internal battles over the issue. See https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-strategic-sectors-including-nuclear-to-boost-independence/ https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-str... for example for Macron staking his campaign on the nuclear subsidies.
- didericis 5y ago
  If we want to adequately prepare for the long term affects of climate change it seems like dykes, irrigation projects, improved farming methods, displacement preparation for affected third world areas, and solutions to mitigate effects regardless of source would be wiser. Freeman Dyson spoke about this. There’s by no means a guarantee that stopping anthropogenic climate change would stop the long term deleterious effects of natural climate change from still occurring. Making the power grid less responsive and more weather dependent is making civilization less adaptive to climate change with no guarantees of stopping climate change, so treating a phase out of coal without adequate replacement like it’s beneficial in the long term doesn’t make sense to me. Reducing coal makes sense, but not at the expense of a less adaptive more weather dependent power grid. Nuclear salt reactors seem like the obvious choice for a replacement from all angles, including CO2, access to fuel, energy output, independence from weather, etc. The only reason why they’re not replacing coal and renewables seems to be regulation and PR. I think the R&D for a lot of them are already done, and they’re much cheaper to maintain and produce/believe a lot of modern designs are quite simple. Most of the expense seems to be from regulatory burden and old laws about different reactors.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    We are building plenty of dykes. But every additional centimetre of sea level rise we cause is at least one more centimetre of dyke we have to maintain along all shores, indefinitely. And on top of that all the additional defences against intense rainfall in cities and along all major rivers. From a purely monetary standpoint it's hard to find an investment that pays greater dividends for a society over the decades and centuries than one that reduces climate change
    - didericis 5y ago
      That assumes we know definitively to what degree reducing anthropogenic climate change will reduce overall climate change, and that creating energy grids with more problems and less adaptability (which lessens our ability to create the kind of infrastructure we would inevitably need to protect vulnerable areas from natural climate change) and the downstream losses from that will prevent interventions that we might need to do anyway with less energy and wealth. Nuclear seems like a great option because it avoids needing to resolve that cost benefit analysis. It reduces CO2 without causing energy grid problems. The newer reactors in particular seem like a pretty definitive win on all fronts. There are a bunch of promising sounding companies trying to get into that space and it sounds like the major roadblock for all of them is regulatory, not technicals or R&D expense at this point (seems like there are existing designs which have been prototyped/are ready to go, just can’t get built due to red tape; one US company moved to Indonesia out of frustration, design seems safe and low cost -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-500?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-500?wprov=sfti1)
- makomk 5y ago
  The big risk here isn't just worse prices, but the grid failing entirely and people not being able to get electricity at any price. And even if it doesn't quite go that far, a whole bunch of businesses will fail and a large swathe of people will have to choose between heating and putting food on the table - and there's no clever tricks with subsidies or redistribution of cash that can avoid that, because the whole reason the prices are so high is because there's not enough energy for everyone.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    Heating in the EU is mostly oil and gas. It needs electricity to run, but not enough that electricity prices are a major issue. In the end the question is how fast the market reacts. Plant shut downs are predictable events years into the future, and in the event of an impeding black out energy prices on the spot market are going to be insane. That seems like a great incentive to build anything you can get past Nimbys fast enough. And the biggest industrial consumers shut down anyways as electricity prices rise (bad for the economy, great for the grid).
jillesvangurp 5y ago
There's only 8GW remaining nuclear capacity in Germany. Shutting that down won't be a major challenge or matter that much in the grand scheme of things. 8GW is only a tiny percentage of the overall market. Germany had 22GW 20 years ago. 16 is gone, the rest will be gone in a few years. It won't matter. Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. Likewise, nuclear darling France is looking to reduce nuclear from about 70% of their energy supply now to about 50%
- heurisko 5y ago
  > Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. The difficulty is that the renewables don't provide baseline power. Ironically, this baseline is now sometimes coming from French nuclear power plants. I respect Germany's concern about nuclear, but the Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
  - labawi 5y ago
    Baseline power is a concept suitable only to describe a grid that operates in a specific configuration (cheap slow stable source + expensive dispatchable source), but not in any way a principal requirement. You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones). If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.
    - liketochill 5y ago
      I think baseline means power plant that is always available, except for outages planned well in advance, and runs 24x7 at a given output. Generally baseline power doesn’t depend on the weather. You could have a stable reliable grid consisting solely of wind and solar but it would also require a lot of storage, which would be insanely expensive in order to achieve the level of reliability we take for granted today. I am sure we will find the limit of penetration for wind and solar, and already people are willing to give up and accept blackouts like in California instead of brushing under the power lines and cutting down trees which might fall on them proactively, which is expensive, they just have a blackout on hot windy days.

patall 5y ago

The last nuclear power plant in Germany will get shutdown in less than 15 months. With that in mind, there have been no investments into them for years. You won't be able to keep them running by simple maintenance. That ship has sailed for years. What do you expect to happen?

Ericson2314 5y ago
A big issue is that Germany, in trying to classify gas but not nuclear as "green", is trying to get every other country to do the same. The insanity must at least be stopped at Germany's boarders.

wongarsu 5y ago

A couple years of worse prices from phasing coal out more quickly seem like nothing compared to the long term effects of climate change. If we're taking about nuclear: I don't see any chance of Germany halting its phase-out of current nuclear plants. New plants meanwhile don't seem sensible economically

Ericson2314 5y ago
The first step I think is making nuclear count as "green" for the the EU subsidies, and natural gas not. Even if no one builds nukes with that plan, then at least all the green parties will be having more public internal battles over the issue. See https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-strategic-sectors-including-nuclear-to-boost-independence/ https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-str... for example for Macron staking his campaign on the nuclear subsidies.
didericis 5y ago
If we want to adequately prepare for the long term affects of climate change it seems like dykes, irrigation projects, improved farming methods, displacement preparation for affected third world areas, and solutions to mitigate effects regardless of source would be wiser. Freeman Dyson spoke about this. There’s by no means a guarantee that stopping anthropogenic climate change would stop the long term deleterious effects of natural climate change from still occurring. Making the power grid less responsive and more weather dependent is making civilization less adaptive to climate change with no guarantees of stopping climate change, so treating a phase out of coal without adequate replacement like it’s beneficial in the long term doesn’t make sense to me. Reducing coal makes sense, but not at the expense of a less adaptive more weather dependent power grid. Nuclear salt reactors seem like the obvious choice for a replacement from all angles, including CO2, access to fuel, energy output, independence from weather, etc. The only reason why they’re not replacing coal and renewables seems to be regulation and PR. I think the R&D for a lot of them are already done, and they’re much cheaper to maintain and produce/believe a lot of modern designs are quite simple. Most of the expense seems to be from regulatory burden and old laws about different reactors.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  We are building plenty of dykes. But every additional centimetre of sea level rise we cause is at least one more centimetre of dyke we have to maintain along all shores, indefinitely. And on top of that all the additional defences against intense rainfall in cities and along all major rivers. From a purely monetary standpoint it's hard to find an investment that pays greater dividends for a society over the decades and centuries than one that reduces climate change
  - didericis 5y ago
    That assumes we know definitively to what degree reducing anthropogenic climate change will reduce overall climate change, and that creating energy grids with more problems and less adaptability (which lessens our ability to create the kind of infrastructure we would inevitably need to protect vulnerable areas from natural climate change) and the downstream losses from that will prevent interventions that we might need to do anyway with less energy and wealth. Nuclear seems like a great option because it avoids needing to resolve that cost benefit analysis. It reduces CO2 without causing energy grid problems. The newer reactors in particular seem like a pretty definitive win on all fronts. There are a bunch of promising sounding companies trying to get into that space and it sounds like the major roadblock for all of them is regulatory, not technicals or R&D expense at this point (seems like there are existing designs which have been prototyped/are ready to go, just can’t get built due to red tape; one US company moved to Indonesia out of frustration, design seems safe and low cost -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-500?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMSR-500?wprov=sfti1)
makomk 5y ago
The big risk here isn't just worse prices, but the grid failing entirely and people not being able to get electricity at any price. And even if it doesn't quite go that far, a whole bunch of businesses will fail and a large swathe of people will have to choose between heating and putting food on the table - and there's no clever tricks with subsidies or redistribution of cash that can avoid that, because the whole reason the prices are so high is because there's not enough energy for everyone.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Heating in the EU is mostly oil and gas. It needs electricity to run, but not enough that electricity prices are a major issue. In the end the question is how fast the market reacts. Plant shut downs are predictable events years into the future, and in the event of an impeding black out energy prices on the spot market are going to be insane. That seems like a great incentive to build anything you can get past Nimbys fast enough. And the biggest industrial consumers shut down anyways as electricity prices rise (bad for the economy, great for the grid).

jillesvangurp 5y ago

There's only 8GW remaining nuclear capacity in Germany. Shutting that down won't be a major challenge or matter that much in the grand scheme of things. 8GW is only a tiny percentage of the overall market. Germany had 22GW 20 years ago. 16 is gone, the rest will be gone in a few years. It won't matter. Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. Likewise, nuclear darling France is looking to reduce nuclear from about 70% of their energy supply now to about 50%

heurisko 5y ago
> Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. The difficulty is that the renewables don't provide baseline power. Ironically, this baseline is now sometimes coming from French nuclear power plants. I respect Germany's concern about nuclear, but the Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
- labawi 5y ago
  Baseline power is a concept suitable only to describe a grid that operates in a specific configuration (cheap slow stable source + expensive dispatchable source), but not in any way a principal requirement. You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones). If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.
  - liketochill 5y ago
    I think baseline means power plant that is always available, except for outages planned well in advance, and runs 24x7 at a given output. Generally baseline power doesn’t depend on the weather. You could have a stable reliable grid consisting solely of wind and solar but it would also require a lot of storage, which would be insanely expensive in order to achieve the level of reliability we take for granted today. I am sure we will find the limit of penetration for wind and solar, and already people are willing to give up and accept blackouts like in California instead of brushing under the power lines and cutting down trees which might fall on them proactively, which is expensive, they just have a blackout on hot windy days.