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Germany proceeded with their "nuclear exit" in 2011. Had they gone the other way and all in on nuclear, they would be in the same situation as they are today as
by locallost 4y ago
Germany proceeded with their "nuclear exit" in 2011. Had they gone the other way and all in on nuclear, they would be in the same situation as they are today as planning and building nuclear plants takes a lot longer than 10 years. Actually they would be way worse because instead of having 50% of electricity coming from renewables, they would still have 45% of it coming from coal, instead of 25% in 2020 (did not check the latest numbers). On top of all that, for the price they are paying to get renewables basically today, they could only get a fraction of the energy in nuclear. And if that wasn't enough, one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia.
One of the worst articles I have ever read in my life.
- ThePhysicist 4y agoThe nuclear exit strategy dates back to 2000, so 22 years ago already.
- anttisalmela 4y agoThey wouldn't have shut down all the working plants. Not that it matters much, wouldn't have been enough.
- locallost 4y agoThey were old, some came online in the 60s. Check the situation in France right now -- half of their aging fleet is offline because they basically can't get them to work. The NY Times had an article on it recently.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago> because they basically can't get them to work That's completely BS. More French reactors are off than usual because of delayed scheduled maintenance caused by Covid.
- throw827474737 4y agoYeah, that problem didn't even exist already pre pandemic, right? Btw, you believe you can maintain those plants forever?
- dispat0r 4y agoNo, you can't maintain them forever. The EDF is mismanaged, in Germany we never had this kind of problems with nuclear plants. South Korea also has an excellent track record with building new plants.
- locallost 4y agohttps://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-power-russia.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p... But the industry has tumbled into an unprecedented power crisis as EDF confronts troubles ranging from the mysterious emergence of stress corrosion inside nuclear plants to a hotter climate that is making it harder to cool the aging reactors. The outages at EDF, Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output tumbling to its lowest level in nearly 30 years, pushing French electric bills to record highs just as the war in Ukraine is stoking broader inflation. ----- The article also mentioned EDF might need to be nationalized since it's in so much debt, and in fact this was announced a few days ago.
- anttisalmela 4y agoLast 10 gigawatts of shut down reactors were all finished in 80's and probably had half of their design age left, all the really old were shut down already in nineties.
- throw827474737 4y agoThis is repeated over and over again, but you have to shut them down ( or heavily sanitize ), because stuff under radiation fire just ages even more quickly than (simplified) normal ""rusting"".. just look at the increased maintenances that risk in France they get blackouts even they compensate via imports? Just few days ago there was a documetary in ARD, a neutral one, about building back plants to green lawn, the cost and the almost century long effort to build them back that is ridiculous (multiple billions) , that is usually never priced in. Speaking of cost I found it surprising again how much just building even the new ones is.. I mean they had to compare to a dam to find something worse, wtf? ( https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/saskatchewan-ontario-to-roll-out-mini-nuclear-reactors-5568249 https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/saskatchewa... ) And then also that even if we accept all those downsides, the unsolved waste problem, (yeah a lot of people will give me armchair proposals or the new non-existing reactors that would just eat everything and leave nothing behind... not), that it is not cost competitive, the risk (yes, you tell me Russians are stupid, Fukushima was an exception, 3mile and other incidents were perfectly avoided, but please consider also war and terror), there just wouldn't be enough fuel for the whole word to go all-in (yeahyeh we just scrub it from the sea.. in theory, as much as we could just get all the drinking water from the sea or scrub all the CO2 from the atmosphere with current tech..). But even if you ignore that again and believe it will be fine, even then if the world would now decide to go all in, the time it takes to build means it wouldn't even make a dent in 15 years - WHICH IS TOO LATE. We could have avoided a lot if the world went all in renewables the 20-30 years back where we already knew what was coming.. and this is the most surprising thing to me. We could do so much suddenly in regard to Pandemic and now the war.. but in relation to the climate catastrophe they are minor annoyances, still we don't start acting but deter us constantly from the right thing by dreaming of the assumed easy nuclear solution out. Humans!!! I derailed, sorry. But it will be bad, and nuclear just wont help even a bit.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y agoIt’s the Phrenology Anthology, what do you expect?
- vasco 4y agoWe can get enough uranium from Canada if needed.
- ElKrist 4y ago"And if that wasn't enough, one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia." To be more precise: 5 countries represent 96% of EU uranium imports: Niger (24,26%), Kazakhstan (22,99%), Russia, Australia and Canada. A country like France has 1-2 years of uranium stock for its electricity production. Dependence on Russia is way less critical for uranium than gas.
- turbinerneiter 4y agoThat's why France got an exception from sanctions made for a uranium delivery from Russia.
- felixlechat 4y agoDo you have any source to support this claim ? AFAIK, France does not rely on Russia for uranium import. France imports uranium mainly (>90%) from Australia, Niger and Kazakhstan [1]. [1] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/luranium-importe-en-europe-et-en-france-provient-il-tres-largement-de-russie-comme-laffirme-yannick-jadot-20220705_LIIEMU2QIRFKZMB46IPBWKFJZQ/ https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/luranium-importe-en-euro...
- mrtksn 4y agoNuclear energy is very cool tech and I think it strikes a chord with techie people and that's why I think nuclear gets a free pass on the economical and operational issues. Nuclear is so amazing, right? Relatively small, high tech self-contained facilities that rhyme with some of the best science fictions out there. However, the moment you dive in it you see just how long it gets to build these things, how expensive they get with with each safety failure and you get to see the unsexy parts of it like mining and processing the raw materials and then the nuclear waste that just sits there waiting to be transferred to its final destination. Working with Russia didn't have to be a bad thing. What makes EU great(you can argue over the other functions of EU) is the peace it creates through co-dependence and shared interest and Russia was very well suited to benefit from it. Russia provides the resources, EU pays for those resources and Russia buys stuff from EU with that money and as a result Europeans get the energy and Russians get the European goods. It's a win-win relationship that fell apart when the head of Russia did not needed to provide with a well being any longer to stay as a head. I personally wish Russia had stayed a partner. It makes sense to be co-depended with partners but as Europe got the short end of the stick as the relationship fell apart it only makes sense offset any dependence to Russia even at a cost.
- pas 4y agoyou know that every form of energy generation today involves some kind of trade off (extraction from the earth, hydro and PV panels and wind turbines require a lot of space, and so on). nuclear advocates advocate for nuclear when it makes sense.
- mrtksn 4y agoI don't know, in my experience nuclear advocates argue how stupid everyone is for not making everything nuclear. In the conversation, some advocate will say how misguided country A was to abandon nuclear just to please hippies and others will point out that the decision was also economical. The nuclear advocate will say that the waste issue is not an issue and the renewable advocate will point out that renewables got drastically cheeper. Then the nuclear advocate will say, good luck when the wind doesn't blow.
- sexy_panda 4y agoJust to make things clear: Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state. Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way. We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it. Bavaria tried to keep themselves out of possible regions for waste disposal, while going full PR pro-nuclear. So nuclear power plants are basically neither a long term solution, nor a short term solution.
- avar 4y agoWe don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. Sure we do, just aerosolize it and vent it into the atmosphere! At which point... Nuclear energy is [...] massively [subsidized] by the state. ...You'd have a fair comparison to other modes of energy production. It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is.
- sexy_panda 4y ago> Sure we do, just aerosolize it Sounds interesting, would you mind to expand / link some site that goes into details? > It's not nuclear that's massively subsidized, everything else is. Germany massively cut funding for solar power being supplied into to the grid (Einspeisevergütung) back in 2012 [1] and it still isn't funded the way it was before. But it is and was still worth it for most people, if they just consumed most of the electricity themselves. [2] [1] https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/37990550_kw09_de_solarverguetung-207880 https://www.bundestag.de/webarchiv/textarchiv/2012/37990550_... [2] https://www.kfw.de/inlandsfoerderung/Privatpersonen/Bestandsimmobilie/Energieeffizient-Sanieren/Photovoltaik/ https://www.kfw.de/inlandsfoerderung/Privatpersonen/Bestands...
- BrandoElFollito 4y ago> Sounds interesting, would you mind to expand / link some site that goes into details? I think that the comment was ironic, to show a parallel with how coal waste is "utilized"
- dispat0r 4y agoYou are right, Germany should have build new nuclear plants in 2000. The renewables make the German energy grid unstable and expensive, we have the highest power cost in the world currently with no end in sight, also no storage for the renewables. You can build nuclear power plants in about 10 Years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant Uranium is not only exported by Russia.
- wewxjfq 4y agoGermany has high consumer electricity prices because of taxation. It's only slightly above EU average if you ignore taxes. And France, the nuclear energy utopia, is only slightly below EU average. And this ignores potential state subsidies, artificial price caps and regulation by the French government, and that Germany uses 1/4 of the electricity price to modernize the grid.
- illiac786 4y agoYou can store electricity pretty well, a 20 millions kWh storage went live in Switzerland recently: https://interestingengineering.com/switzerlands-water-battery-operational https://interestingengineering.com/switzerlands-water-batter...
- BenoitP 4y agoIf Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would not be wasting currently 5GW of gas for electricity (and burning much less lignite coal as well): https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE > one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1], according to UNECE. [1] https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20March%202022.pdf https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/LCA_3_FINAL%20...
- wewxjfq 4y agoThe EU publishes official numbers on where they get their uranium from, there is no need to make guesstimates, Russian uranium accounts for 20%. And this ignores that Russia has the largest uranium processing capabilities in the world, so dependency on Russia is higher than the imports of natural uranium suggest. Lastly, nuclear power plants produce a constant base load while the coal and gas power plants have a very dynamic output and it's simply misleading to pretend that a GW of nuclear energy can replace a GW of coal or gas without taking all of the production into account.
- cschwarm 4y agoIf Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would be burning about as much fossil fuels as it does now. That's because without the opposition to nuclear, the motivating reason to build up renewables would have been gone, so it wouldn't have happen. Which means Germany would have continued with about 10 % (of primary energy) nuclear and the rest would have been fossil fuels.
- locallost 4y agoWhich makes them one of the largest exporters of uranium in the world, including to the EU, which is what I've said. A victim of what exactly? Knowing the facts? Imagine the importance of Russian uranium if there was a nuclear renaissance and the world suddenly built terawatts of nuclear plants, which is what this article is proposing and presumably you too. And also, Russians are one of the last countries that actually builds them including abroad, so a nuclear surge would mean countries lining up to have Russian nuclear plants built. The article is devoid of not only data, but common sense.
- TheChaplain 4y agoSweden built one in 6 years (Barseback) and another in 5 years (Oskarshamn), both ran fine without causing nuclear disasters. And now almost 50 years later we have way waaay more knowledge, experience and technology to build safe powerplants within a short time. The hindrance is bureaucracy. Ask anyone who is or have been working for the government how incredibly inefficient it is.
- locallost 4y agoIn the US, there was one nuclear plant that went online in this century: it is the second unit of the plant in Tennessee whose construction started in 1973. It was finished in 2016, after 43 years. There is also a construction in progress in Georgia, currently approaching 20 years of development. The problem with government inefficiency and nuclear is that the governments are the only ones that dare spend money on it. An example of a private investment was the plant in South Carolina that was halted after 9 billion spent. The reason was that they realized they would not make it in time to cash in on a subsidy, and without that the project would never ever be profitable. And normally you could say it happens, it's the company's money, but the debt is being paid by the utility's customers. They're paying for electricity from a power plant that does not exist. I don't understand the people that think this is a rational solution.
- throwoutway 4y agoWhere do you justify your numbers? 45%? They make no sense to me.
- gdy 4y ago"planning and building nuclear plants takes a lot longer than 10 years" Russia or Korea build a nuclear power unit in approximately 8 years, China - 6.