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Germany to Keep Last Three Nuclear-Power Plants Running
- janmarsal 4y agoFinally some good news. Too bad it needed a war to happen.
- timmg 4y agoThis is the smart/obvious thing for them to do, bravo. This is also a very negative thing for Putin and Russia. Glad to see more negative results to the Russians from their invasion.
- Arnt 4y agoCould you elaborate? It's not going to affect the 10m+ gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, ovens or stoves, or any of the chemical industry that use 85% of the gas. It's not going to replace even half of the gas-fired power plants that use the remaining 15%. So why is it smart, obvious, or very negative for Putin?
- guywithahat 4y agoPresumably because Germany won't have to start burning more fuel to replace the lost nuclear electricity, although I'm not op.
- jfim 4y agoIt's probably negative in the long term, since there is enough public awareness about the Russian gas imports being problematic and that nuclear power is being considered less of a problem than Russian gas. Also it means that political parties will likely add the sourcing of energy as an important part of their platform in the future, leading to debate as to what should be the future of energy in Germany and how independent or not they should be from Russian gas.
- wongarsu 4y agoYou could argue that it's getting outsized media attention compared to the impact, but any impact that reduces natural gas use is good for Germany, and anything that helps Europe withstand Putin's sanctions is bad for Putin. The economic and safety questions seem settled, so the thing that stands in the way of this step being obvious is the self-image and identity of the German Green party.
- ivan_gammel 4y agoGreen voters are mostly fine with this, so it’s not a big deal for the party.
- Moldoteck 4y agojust out of my mind: they could export that energy(and maybe i'm wrong, but it is cheap to produce, somewhere next to gas) to countries that produce electricity from russian gas, at least till other sources will be used in that countries But I really don't believe they'll keep them running, seeing what german politicians have done in the past
- timmg 4y agoGermany typically uses X joules of energy to run its economy. Some percent of that X comes via nat gas (and oil) from Russia. If they replace some of those Russian joules with nuclear joules, then a smaller percentage comes from Russia. That lowers demand for fossil fuels. That reduces revenue for Russia. > It's not going to affect the 10m+ gas-fired furnaces, water heaters, ovens or stoves... Not at once. But it certainly makes it easier for people to replace nat gas appliances with electric ones. If you are heating your home with nat gas and the price explodes, it would be beneficial to lower your thermostat and crank up an electric space heater to make up (some) of the difference.
- Arnt 4y agoThe thing is that maybe around 1% of the joules can be replaced with nuclear. Most can't because connecting electricity wires to a gas-fired furnace does nothing (good). I once started a bugfixing week with fixing a bug that caused around 1% of the crashes. My team lead didn't think that was either smart, obvious or very anythingatall, and said so loudly and clearly in the team meeting.
- timmg 4y ago> The thing is that maybe around 1% of the joules can be replaced with nuclear. Citation needed. These plants are running now. Are you saying the electricity they are generating is not being used? The question is what replaces those joules if they shut them down?
- _ph_ 4y agoThey are providing like 6% of the German electricity. So yes, replacing them will require more fossil fuel short time. On the other side, the idea is to replace them with renewal sources. Germany is already at 50 renewables in the electricity mix. Nuclear is not really a replacement for gas, rather than coal, due to its slow nature. Gas power plants are used in Germany mostly for quick peak power.
- Arnt 4y agoMost of the gas isn't used for generating electricity. Rather, it's used at the point where the electricity would be used. If you build a house you can install a furnace that gets joules from the electricity network or from the gas network, see? And there are a little over ten million houses and apartments that get their warm water and heating from gas-heated boilers/furnaces. See https://www.haustec.de/heizung/waermeerzeugung/waermemarkt-waechst-gasheizungen-bleiben-die-beliebteste-heiztechnologie https://www.haustec.de/heizung/waermeerzeugung/waermemarkt-w... for example. There's also the chemical industry, which uses gas as chemicals, not as a source of joules.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago> This is also a very negative thing for Putin and Russia This is to prepare for Russia cutting off gas entirely to the EU, which would cause harm to Russia's O&G revenue as a result of Russia's strategic choice, not due to EU actions. Russia is making record profits off high gas prices, there were no negative results to their energy industry from their invasion. All of the negative results were from sanctions on the rest of their economy and from freezing their USD/EUR currency reserves.
- eshch 4y agoWhy did they not do that before and chose Russian gas instead of nuclear power? It's puzzling me what bad did they find in nuclear power.
- MandieD 4y agoConcerns about nuclear waste disposal top the list for my German in-laws, followed by the increasingly less-theoretical worries about providing scary targets for when the unprecedentedly long current peace ends.
- detaro 4y agoAccording to German sources the government denies this report and points to the currently running evaluations. (e.g. https://www.rtl.de/cms/atomkraftwerke-in-deutschland-verwirrung-um-moegliche-laufzeit-verlaengerung-nach-bericht-5002170.html https://www.rtl.de/cms/atomkraftwerke-in-deutschland-verwirr...)
- koheripbal 4y agoGiven that the Prime Minister appointed an ideologue Greenpeace activist as the head of Climate policy, I too am skeptical that Germany has reversed its decision.
- causi 4y agoI don't know why you're flagged. Germany's special envoy for international climate policy, Jennifer Morgan, is indeed the chief of Greenpeace International. Granted it's debatable how much direct power the post has.
- forty 4y agoI haven't downvoted, but I think it might be because calling someone an ideologue because you disagree with them is bad taste.
- colechristensen 4y agoIf we go ahead and look at the definition of the word, I think it would almost be an automatic label for a Greenpeace leader.
- SECProto 4y agoDictionary definitions generally don't include information on connotation. Edit: I searched to find a dictionary for word connotations, best I found in a couple mins is https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ychoi/connotation/ https://www3.cs.stonybrook.edu/~ychoi/connotation/
- hash07e 4y ago
- kube-system 4y agoPlanning for 2025 is great, and I'm sure Germans are resilient, but not resilient enough to go without energy in Winter 2022/23. Nuclear power is reliable, already exists, and is cleaner than fossil fuel.
- hash07e 4y ago
- kube-system 4y agoClimate change doesn't make weather warmer, it makes weather more extreme.
- hash07e 4y agook, then. they could use a warm coat. Central heating is modern thing. It is good to have but not vital.
- kube-system 4y agoHumans have used fire for heat in cold climates for millennia. Many dwellings lack the facilities to heat with open flame anymore.
- DasIch 4y agoHouses with central heating are designed with central heating in mind. They tend to fail in ugly ways, if that stops working. You lose warm water, water pipes may freeze and break, mold can grow etc. If you don't want to essentially demolish such a house next spring, you definitely need to provide at least a minimum of heat to the entire house and as you can't exactly do campfires inside you have to centrally heat it.
- intrestingstuff 4y agoMaybe they got the tip from the same sources that claimed Musk and Mrs Brin had an affaire
- WalterBright 4y agoThe most sensible, efficient, and effective climate change policy would be to: 1. tax the carbon content of fuels 2. use nuclear power for baseload power generation
- TheDudeMan 4y ago1. Tax the carbon emissions of all industries. 2. Let the market decide how to profitably generate power.
- WalterBright 4y agoIt's much easier to tax the carbon content of fuel, rather than try to measure what the industry emits.
- Krssst 4y agoAre grid operators and electricity generation operators separated in the US? Depending on the grid policy, what is profitable may change. If in case of surproduction you ask baseload to reduce production in favor of NREs, then NREs will be more profitable (compared to a fifty-fifty approach) and baseload will be less so. On the opposite, if you ask NRE to reduce production, baseload will be more profitable. (in case of fossil baseload generation, favoring NREs makes a lot of sense since you save the fuel cost, but for nuclear uranium is only a minor part of the cost)
- natmaka 4y agoThis facet of the "merit of order" is, amongst clean (non-greenhouse-effect emitting) sources, mainly decided upon the cost of production, and therefore renewables are already (and more and more) preferred upon nuclear, reducing its capacity factor and therefore condemning it (because a nuclear reactor economics implies a high capacity factor: letting it down or idle is very expensive). https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020 https://www.lazard.com/perspective/lcoe2020
- kgarten 4y agolooking how bad things are in France, I'm surprised that nobody who thinks Nuclear Power is a solution to global warming discusses the high needs for cooling ... nuclear power plants need large amounts of water. https://m.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-plants-break-a-sweat-over-heat-wave/a-62806646 https://m.dw.com/en/french-nuclear-plants-break-a-sweat-over...
- Krssst 4y agoThere are alternatives for cooling: https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/technical-positions/cooling-of-power-plants.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/our-association/publications/techn... In any case nuclear is not the solution to global warming, just part of it (for electricity baseload generation where it makes sense). Also, France has neglected building new capacity for decades.
- natmaka 4y ago> France has neglected building new capacity for decades No. The last built reactor (Civaux-2) was delivered in 1999, and the new generation architecture "EPR" reactor (which was set as the lead of a series) project began in 2004, its construction began in 2007, never stopped, and albeit costing way over its budget it isn't yet delivered.
- sebazzz 4y agoIs it possible to design plants to allow salt seawater for cooling?
- cmelbye 4y agoYes it’s very common. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/cooling-power-plants.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-fu...
- amai 4y agoShutting down power plants during winter was never a good idea and a kind of arbitrary decision. Given the situation with russian gas Germany probably will keep the nuclear power plants running until next summer and then shut them down forever.