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Germany to switch off last remaining nuclear power plants
- spyke112 3y agohttps://archive.ph/Fefhs https://archive.ph/Fefhs
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoAnd the coal plants?
- Mashimo 3y agohttps://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/klimaschutz/kohleausstieg-1664496 https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/klimaschutz/ko... > Bis spätestens im Jahr 2038 soll das letzte Kohlekraftwerk in Deutschland stillgelegt werden.
- toomanyrichies 3y agoGoogle Translate results, for those who don't speak German: "The last coal-fired power plant in Germany is to be shut down by 2038 at the latest."
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoI wonder if there is a Y2038 bug in the plant control code that is setting the hard deadline.
- hutzlibu 3y agoThey are burning greatly and recently there was supposedly the last village demolished, to get more coal. Also, you can buy coal in the supermarket and use it in your unfiltered stove at home. So not everything is green here, despite a green government.
- mvdwoord 3y agoLet them eat yellowcake.
- waynenilsen 3y agoIs there any rational basis for this that makes any sense? I honestly want to understand the anti-nuclear position but I can't seem to find anything that really is convincing.
- josteink 3y agoThere isn't. But existing nuclear-power (where the environmental cost is already paid) isn't perceived "green", even though we can get stable "free" power for years and years and years. The "Green shift" is fundamentally not scientific, but driven by emotions and buzzwords, and hand-wavey things which can appear to be environmentally friendly or in some cases, just pure environmental accounting cheating/fraud (like moving your emissions to another country instead). What all professional politicians really care most about though is their own personal reelection, and you can't get reelected without appealing to a wide enough audience. Doing "green" things is their current strategy to appeal to (non-rational perceptions held by) younger demographics.
- JanSt 3y agoIt‘s basically fear. The Green Party was founded with the mission to stop nuclear power in Germany. The media repeated their talking points for years and years. It sounds so good and we have dozens of „experts“ who tell us how expensive and dangerous nuclear power is.
- civilized 3y agoAs an American, it's so interesting to look at the intra-European differences we normally ignore. France managed to scale nuclear power with the consent of the population, and it's gone fine, but for some reason countries right next door don't see anything worth learning. I guess you could say the same about America and Canada, but some of us are accustomed to seeing Europeans as more enlightened than us politically. I suppose people around the world are not that different in the end.
- Mashimo 3y agoFrance has a long term storage for nuclear waste. Germany has to dig their waste up again because groundwater is leaking in.
- mcv 3y agoBut when are they switching off their last remaining coal power plants? That is far more urgent. Please leave some nuclear power plants operational if doing so helps you to turn of coal power plants.
- dschuetz 3y agoYeah, that's the real question here.
- jillesvangurp 3y agoCoal plants should be gone by 2038. Though the current government coalition is still trying to speed this up to 2030. This seems not entirely feasible though they'll probably get quite far with it. Anyway, some time between 2030 and 2038 most of these plants should be gone. Lignite should be gone sooner than that. https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-coal-region-brings-coal-phase-out-forward-2030-refires-lignite-short-term https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-coal-region-brin...
- JanSt 3y agoAs a German you get accustomed to carzy fear-led policies like these. FYI our „experts“ and think-tanks (DIW, Agora Energiewende, Öko-Ibstitut) are sure renewables are basically free and nuclear is blocking the RE build-up. Plus, nuclear is so dangerous and produces so much waste, it is a non-starter. The only thing they hate more than Co2 is nuclear power, thus we keep runnung brown coal power plants at 1kg/Co2 per kwh. Thanks I guess.
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoAnd additionally spraying yourself with radioactive material which is naturally contained in coal.
- IceHegel 3y agoThis seems completely irrational and emotionally driven. If a single person was responsible it would be easier to show this, but one of the perks of a large organization is that no one is responsible for anything.
- Mashimo 3y ago> This seems completely irrational and emotionally driven No, not completely. Even after decades of search and committee, Germany still does not have a long term nuclear waste site. And with a history of the government fucking those up in Germany it's understandable no one wants them. Emotional yes, irrational not.
- rallyforthesun 3y agoif you ask for the logic of this action: There is still no one in the world, who would like to store the remaining nuclear waste which this technology produces.
- Cardinal7167 3y agoNuclear waste is a solved problem that only fear mongers bring up anymore.
- Mashimo 3y agoGoing to be difficult in Germany. History of fucking those storage sites up, high population density and strong NIMBY movement. This ain't Finland. Edit: Reality: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/suche-nach-atommuell-endlager-103.html https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/suche-nach-ato... (Maybe they have a decision for a possible location in 2046, maybe 2068)
- lnsru 3y agoGermany also left research of future energy technology and research of own weapons. Basically US must save Germany again and again for another hundreds of years keeping nuclear weapons in Germany. Also Germany went all-in in buying ship-wise solar panels from China constructing another dependency. Stupid thing is that sun does not shine in the night. Also batteries will be bought container-wise from China. I don’t know if it was clever decision to replace nuclear with coal. Kinda of back to the 60s.
- tfourb 3y agoA country like Germany could expand its current electricity production by about 50% while simultaneously phasing out nuclear and fossil fuels at a whole sale price for electricity below current market rates and with current technology. In case of Germany, a 2015 study compared various scenarios for how electricity demand will develop by 2050. The most expansive scenario assumes a yearly demand of 800 TWh, compared to roughly 500 TWh in 2021. [1] The additional demand comes from electrifying cars and heating, etc. Demand does of course vary by time of day, but is virtually stable from month to month. Variability of renewable production is quite high, so let's assume that you'd need long-term grid-scale electricity buffers for about 30% of yearly demand. The most basic approach to this would be the transformation of electricity and water into Hydrogen when an excess of electricity is available and the reverse when demand outstrips supply. The combined efficiency of that process (electricity->Hydrogen->electricity) is roughly 50%. I'm actually pretty sure that by 2050 we'll have much better solutions available, but this approach is doable with current tech and has the added bonus of being able to be combined with a hydrogen infrastructure similar to how natural gas is currently used, i.e. for industrial processes and heating. That would put total yearly demand at 1,040 TWh, which based on the efficiency of currently available PV and wind turbines [2] would require a total nominal installed capacity of about 1.040 GW (based on real world data from Germany, 1 GW in installed renewable capacity is roughly equal to a yearly production of 1 TWh. This will vary based on local circumstances, but Germany is not particularly bountiful in its renewable potential compared to other countries). Currently, Germany has a total installed capacity of solar, wind and water power generation of about 125GW but I will assume that all these installations will reach their end of life before 2050 and will need to be replaced as part of this project. At current prices for the installation of new PV (700,000 €/MW) and wind onshore/offshore (3,000,000 €/MW) and assuming a 50/50 split in installed capacity, the total investment for the required 1,040 MW would come to roughly 2 Trillion Euros over 30 years, or about 66 Billion Euros per year. Divided by 800 TWh of yearly demand, this comes out to 8.3 cents (Euro) per KWh. This is comfortably below the 2021 average whole sale price of roughly 10 cents/KWh and in Germany would come out to about 20 cents/KWh for private consumers, compared to the current market average of roughly 30 cents/KWh. Of course current energy production is quite heavily subsidized by the German government. If subsidies continue (or taxes on electricity are lowered), price per KWh could be reduced substantially. This is of course only a very rough and simplified calculation. But it is straightforward and based on real world data, a pessimistic energy consumption scenario and current technologies. It ignores the potential for geothermal energy, biomass, imported hydrogen, long-distance imports of solar energy from the Sahara, or hydro power from Northern Europe, as well as likely technological improvement for generating and storing renewable energy. Looking at this, I find it hard to believe that absent a complete revolution of reactor design and cost-effectiveness, nuclear power will have any serious role to play in this, given its regulatory challenges, capital expenditure requirements, construction times and unsolved waste management issues. [1] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2015/Stromverbrauch_in_der_Energiewende/086_IWES_Szenarienvergl_dt_WEB.pdf https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin/Projekte/2015/St... [2] https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten https://www.smard.de/home/marktdaten
- rallyforthesun 3y agoWe as germans would like to keep our nuclear powerplants running as long as possible, but the question of how to store the nuclear waste for the little timespan of hundreds of thousand years has not been answered in a satisfying way. The issue of nuclear waste storage is a complex and difficult one, as nuclear waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years and requires specialized storage facilities that are secure and environmentally safe. Despite ongoing research and development into new storage technologies, no country has yet come up with a completely satisfactory solution to this problem.
- 0xDEF 3y ago>as nuclear waste can remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands Why does the German government and anti-nuclear activists insist on pushing this falsehood? After a few decades most of it will have decayed into low-radioactive isotopes. It will then just be the usual chemically toxic industrial waste.
- Mashimo 3y ago> no country has yet come up with a completely satisfactory solution to this problem. France and Finland have a decent solution. Germany was really really really bad at storing nuclear waste. Which is why I'm also against nuclear power plants in Germany.
- ohyes 3y agoYou’ve been misled and misinformed. The majority of Nuclear “waste” can be reprocessed and reused and the lifespan is not “hundreds of thousands of years.” Ironically the biggest issue ends up being the radioactive reactor components that you end up having to deal with when decommissioning.
- honeybadger1 3y agoHistory will point to Germany when class starts to discuss regressive energy policy.
- Mashimo 3y agoProbably. But also mixed in are some progressive policies. For example recent changes that allow Balkonkraftwerke. But what we know for sure is that history already now points at Germany on how to not store Nuclear waste.
- scanny 3y agoJust a note ‚ the decision was made around 2011 and now they were faced with getting new fuel rods (decades of use) or running with the legislated phase-out. There isn’t an in between option it seems
- ttul 3y agoAlthough it is sad that Germany has chosen the path of fear, consider that its neighbors are free to step in with additional nuclear power capacity and seem to be doing so. Since the European grid is connected across borders, Germans will continue using nuclear power regardless. It just won’t be provided by plants inside Germany’s borders.
- devdude1337 3y agoWhile there are lots of fear-driven opponents here in germany, we also know our math - and you can be sure if there was a huge ecological and economical benefit from nuclear power we would build reactors like crazy. But it turns out that it’s not cheap enough and building and maintaining those plants doesn’t save much greenhouse gases. If we built them en masse many years ago the numbers could be better maybe. Anyway renewables are our way to go and until we get there we keep the coal so we don’t end up in the middle ages.