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What I don't get about all of this is that the hard, expensive part of nuclear power is building + certifying the plants. Once they're up and running, they prod

What I don't get about all of this is that the hard, expensive part of nuclear power is building + certifying the plants. Once they're up and running, they produce essentially free, zero-carbon electricity, safely and reliably. So why turn off the working ones if you're anti-nuke? Why not just stop new construction? They're going to burn coal instead, which releases vastly more radioactive material.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
The „Energiewende“ must be understood as a de-growth, anti-prosperity ideology. If it was about co2, they wouldn’t do this. We sinned, thus we must atone by consuming less, achieving less, being less. The usual high-low alliance that is used as a political technology to acquire power.
- realusername 4y ago
  Whatever happens in terms of reduction of energy use, the electricity usage itself will grow in the future, that's a given. All the petrol use must be converted, even with a reduction. Thus, countries should plan for an increase of electricity usage to be ready.
  - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    Exactly. We need massively more electricity in the future than we consume now, we should be expanding generation capacity, not reduce it.
- oezi 4y ago
  If we end up less reliant on Saudi oil and less at risk of a hellscape future, then I would be fine if RWE / Vattenfall / EON who profiteered in the past get replaced.
  - MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    So lignite it is, then.
pavlov 4y ago
The “safe and reliable” part was wrecked in the general public’s perception by Chernobyl and Fukushima. Germany’s decision to close all their existing plants came shortly after the latter disaster. Yes, Fukushima was nowhere near as catastrophic as Chernobyl, but it was very effective in creating the impression that this kind of thing will keep happening; that power plants aren’t safe even in an impeccably diligent culture like Japan (as it’s perceived in the West); that the tireless anti-nuclear campaigning of the preceding decades had been right all along. That’s the kind of public mood that politicians can ill afford to ignore.
- qwytw 4y ago
  > That’s the kind of public mood that politicians can ill afford to ignore. But is safety really the primary concern amongst the public? I mean there are perfectly valid economic arguments against developing nuclear power, especially nowadays. Of course stopping the expansion of nuclear power back in the 70/80s was a huge tragedy. If we stayed on the same trajectory as throughout the 60s well.. climate change would probably be viewed as a more or less solved (or at least an actually solvable) issue today. And honestly, if nuclear energy was financially viable would it be hard to change this quite irrational 'mood'? I mean in the EU alone pollution form Coal plants causes about twice as much premature deaths as the Chernobyl disaster did over a 20 year period (according to the worst estimates, it would be about 8 times as much if we use the IAEA figures). Nuclear is objectively one of the safest sources of energy. If we exclude Chernobyl (we should since it was a direct outcome of a multistage failure which is only possible in idiocratic states like the USSR) it's about a hundredfold safer than natural gas which is about 10 less harmful (when measuring in human lives) than coal for an equivalent amount of power generated. > The “safe and reliable” part was wrecked in the general public’s perception Unless we believe that the general public is completely mathematically illiterate (i.e. most people couldn't pass a basic 2nd grade level math test) this shouldn't be too hard to change with enough political will.
  - RandomLensman 4y ago
    Nuclear energy as-is is very expensive and the cost trajectory in the past wasn't great either (i.e., not dropping fast).
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Working nuclear plants have refueling, maintenance and staffing costs. These are small compared with the initial outlay, and with fossil fuel plants (where the fuel costs dominate) but not small compared with building new renewables from scratch. The Lazard PDF currently linked from this site has numbers on this.
Retric 4y ago
“The expensive part of nuclear power is building + certifying” Unfortunately this is not the case, decommissioning for example is extremely expensive though can be deferred for years. Nuclear requires a large and expensive workforce, expensive maintenance, extremely expensive fuel possessing before it’s us fuel in a nuclear reactor, and insurance that’s so expensive no private company is able to offer it. Construction being the largest cost is really in reference to financing + construction + land + regulatory hurdles + any R&D costs. The direct construction costs run about twice what staffing does over the plant’s lifespan. However, because profits are so low and construction takes so long the loans must extend over decades which greatly inflates the cost of construction. On the flip side delaying decommissioning means the money set aside can grow before you’re forced to spend it. As strange as it sounds lowering operating costs would actually reduce “construction” costs as you could pay back the loans sooner.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > Unfortunately this is not the case, decommissioning for example is extremely expensive though can be deferred for years. Well then closing plants makes even less sence, youll have to decomission them sooner
  - Retric 4y ago
    I wouldn’t be sure of that. As I understand it, nuclear power plants are limited by corrosion so the end date for decommissioning is likely based on the power plants construction date not its final date of operation. There’s regulations that lost decommissioning must finish within 60 years of shutdown, but that stuff is often flexible in practice where physics isn’t.
alexott 4y ago
Who said that people are rational? Especially in green party?
- quonn 4y ago
  The decision was made [0] by the CDU (government Merkel II) in 2011 right after Fukushima, not by the Green Party. Reversing it would come at a great cost [1]. Of course the Green Party also doesn‘t want to, but that boat sailed long ago. And rational, for Germany which does: - not have nuclear weapons - has far cheaper renewables in cost per kwh - is densely populated with no viable far away place to store the stuff means to quit nuclear. In the end the debate depends on whether externalities are internalized or not. If they are internalized, renewable energy wins hands down [2]. —- [0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium [1] Germany got sued previously for undoing an exit. It‘s predictable this would happen again. [2] As shown in the report by the scientific service of the German parliament: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edcc0e32cb093ab073767/WD-5-005-22-pdf-data.pdf https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edc...
  - qwytw 4y ago
    > has far cheaper renewables in cost per kwh Currently yes. In the 80s and 90s not so much. It's huge a tragedy nuclear expansion stopped back then because nuclear was very cheap if we factor the indirect costs from burning fossil fuels (specifically premature deaths and other healthcare issues due to pollution. We basically get 2 to 8 free Chernobyls every year just by burning coal in the EU alone. Stopping climate change would just have been a free bonus).
  - epups 4y ago
    Renewables are cheap, until you hit a day without a lot of Sun or wind and you start running your death-inducing coal reactors.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  The green party hasn't been in power for the last 16 year. Still, the conservatives didn't change anything about this. Now they're a minority in a coalition. Still, nobody did anything about it. The fact that some people (especially non-Germans) repeat this blame-show shows where it actually comes from: an misguided Astro-Turf campaign which doesn't care about facts.
this_user 4y ago
These plants are all 40 years and older, which means they are EOL or close to it anyway. You could do another costly overhaul and squeeze a few more years out of them, but the bottom line will be same.
- prepend 4y ago
  Why would a power plant be EOL after 40 years. These are massive capital expenditures and I would expect a planned lifespan of 100-200 years. Having a 40 year designed lifespan on something that takes 10 years to build and 10 to shut off seems really bad.
  - toast0 4y ago
    The expectation when they were planned and built starting 50 years ago was that during their planned lifetime, nuclear power technology would improve significantly and they would naturaly be replaced with modern reactors at the end of their design lifetime. Of course, nobody planned for the Chernobyl disaster and the resulting lack of support for nuclear energy. Engineering wise, there are a lot of parts of the reactor that I think you have to pick between being able to service and replace the part and having it be useful and safe. So when those parts wear out, you can't really fix them. Or you have to wait so long for it to be safe to service them, that it's not worth it. Coal and gas plants don't last forever either, but they can generally be rebuilt in place, making the comparison tricky. Coal tends to release all of its radioactive waste into the air, the facility itself doesn't become a hazard to service.
Krasnol 4y ago
They're actually going to phase out coal completely by 2038. After 16 years of Merkel breaking renewables, they're being expanded again. An expansion which, in the past helped to establish this technology on this planet. Edit (since the Astro-Turf downvotes prevent me from answering to even more falsehoods being posted here...): And no, they couldn't have phased out coal completely because NO party wanted to lose voters in those regions where coal is generated. Just have a look at the name and tasks of the commission tasked with the phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structural_Change_and_Employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  I think the argument is that they could have phased out coal 10 years sooner, if they just left alone the nuclear plants they already had
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    The argument doesn't make any sense since one has nothing to do with the other. See my edit.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  2038 is far enough into the future that anything and its opposite could happen by then.
  - Krasnol 4y ago
    Sure. Like a nuclear accident in one of the rotting French reactors for example. Meanwhile, the expansion of cheap renewable energy which gets better and cheaper continues to happen.
- qwytw 4y ago
  Well they could've have already done that by now if not a decade or two ago if they skipped the period of mass psychosis back in the 80s...
oezi 4y ago
Look to France to see what getting too reliant on Nuclear can do. Germany had a healthy mix with some nuclear and it would have made sense to keep them running until renewables power everything (which they will). But: Nuclear can't be justed bounced around on a whim. Even the Russian war in Ukraine couldn't reverse course because the powerplants weren't getting re-certified by their operators. The fact is that Germany will build 13 GW of renewables this year, which offsets those last 4 GW of Nuclear somewhat.
- skywal_l 4y ago
  No country* can produce its electricity only based on renewables. They are not dispatchable and occupy a lot of land. So you need a base. France decided that the base would be nuclear and Germany decided it would be fossil fuel. Not sure there is clear a cut argument that one choice is better than the other. As to what happened in France, it is not related to the nuclear technology itself and could have happen to any type of technology. They built all those power plants following the same design at the same time and all failed the same way at the same time. No surprise here. * Or maybe a country with a very small population and a lot of unused land maybe which is a pretty small category.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    > No country* can produce its electricity only based on renewables What utter bullshit. Most countries could do so.
    - pyuser583 4y ago
      Could explain why it’s “bullshit?”
      - pfdietz 4y ago
        The person I was responding to qualified with "* Or maybe a country with a very small population and a lot of unused land maybe which is a pretty small category." But if you actually do the arithmetic, you will find that land constraints are not important for most countries. There's plenty of land for most countries to produce what they need (as long as they don't do something braindead like trying to burn biomass). Put it another way: the value of the energy generated per area of land is much greater than the value produced by other uses of the land, like agriculture or forestry, and no one claims those are infeasible. I believe this wrong belief about renewables not being able to do the job came from the assumption that large amounts of biofuel would be needed (IIRC MacKay's "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" made this mistake). The efficiency of sunlight => fuel from growth of biomass is very low.
simplotek 4y ago
> What I don't get about all of this is that the hard, expensive part of nuclear power is building + certifying the plants. Not really. The hard part is ensuring that nuclear can be safe throughout it's service life. This is what leads to construction process to be extremely expensive, and certification is just an umbrella term that means "checking if the plant doesn't exhibit any of the risks involving pre established problems and disaster scenarios by going through a number of checks."
- qwytw 4y ago
  > This is what leads to construction process to be extremely expensive That and the fact that almost all nuclear plants tend to be one-off projects nowadays unlike in the 60s and 70s (and of the plants built in the west back then are still at least 100 times "safer" than the coals plants that are currently operated when measured in the number of deaths caused, of course premature deaths due to unnecessary pollution seem to be very cheap politically..).

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago

The „Energiewende“ must be understood as a de-growth, anti-prosperity ideology. If it was about co2, they wouldn’t do this. We sinned, thus we must atone by consuming less, achieving less, being less. The usual high-low alliance that is used as a political technology to acquire power.

realusername 4y ago
Whatever happens in terms of reduction of energy use, the electricity usage itself will grow in the future, that's a given. All the petrol use must be converted, even with a reduction. Thus, countries should plan for an increase of electricity usage to be ready.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  Exactly. We need massively more electricity in the future than we consume now, we should be expanding generation capacity, not reduce it.
oezi 4y ago
If we end up less reliant on Saudi oil and less at risk of a hellscape future, then I would be fine if RWE / Vattenfall / EON who profiteered in the past get replaced.
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  So lignite it is, then.

pavlov 4y ago

The “safe and reliable” part was wrecked in the general public’s perception by Chernobyl and Fukushima. Germany’s decision to close all their existing plants came shortly after the latter disaster. Yes, Fukushima was nowhere near as catastrophic as Chernobyl, but it was very effective in creating the impression that this kind of thing will keep happening; that power plants aren’t safe even in an impeccably diligent culture like Japan (as it’s perceived in the West); that the tireless anti-nuclear campaigning of the preceding decades had been right all along. That’s the kind of public mood that politicians can ill afford to ignore.

qwytw 4y ago
> That’s the kind of public mood that politicians can ill afford to ignore. But is safety really the primary concern amongst the public? I mean there are perfectly valid economic arguments against developing nuclear power, especially nowadays. Of course stopping the expansion of nuclear power back in the 70/80s was a huge tragedy. If we stayed on the same trajectory as throughout the 60s well.. climate change would probably be viewed as a more or less solved (or at least an actually solvable) issue today. And honestly, if nuclear energy was financially viable would it be hard to change this quite irrational 'mood'? I mean in the EU alone pollution form Coal plants causes about twice as much premature deaths as the Chernobyl disaster did over a 20 year period (according to the worst estimates, it would be about 8 times as much if we use the IAEA figures). Nuclear is objectively one of the safest sources of energy. If we exclude Chernobyl (we should since it was a direct outcome of a multistage failure which is only possible in idiocratic states like the USSR) it's about a hundredfold safer than natural gas which is about 10 less harmful (when measuring in human lives) than coal for an equivalent amount of power generated. > The “safe and reliable” part was wrecked in the general public’s perception Unless we believe that the general public is completely mathematically illiterate (i.e. most people couldn't pass a basic 2nd grade level math test) this shouldn't be too hard to change with enough political will.
- RandomLensman 4y ago
  Nuclear energy as-is is very expensive and the cost trajectory in the past wasn't great either (i.e., not dropping fast).

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Working nuclear plants have refueling, maintenance and staffing costs. These are small compared with the initial outlay, and with fossil fuel plants (where the fuel costs dominate) but not small compared with building new renewables from scratch. The Lazard PDF currently linked from this site has numbers on this.

Retric 4y ago

“The expensive part of nuclear power is building + certifying” Unfortunately this is not the case, decommissioning for example is extremely expensive though can be deferred for years. Nuclear requires a large and expensive workforce, expensive maintenance, extremely expensive fuel possessing before it’s us fuel in a nuclear reactor, and insurance that’s so expensive no private company is able to offer it. Construction being the largest cost is really in reference to financing + construction + land + regulatory hurdles + any R&D costs. The direct construction costs run about twice what staffing does over the plant’s lifespan. However, because profits are so low and construction takes so long the loans must extend over decades which greatly inflates the cost of construction. On the flip side delaying decommissioning means the money set aside can grow before you’re forced to spend it. As strange as it sounds lowering operating costs would actually reduce “construction” costs as you could pay back the loans sooner.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> Unfortunately this is not the case, decommissioning for example is extremely expensive though can be deferred for years. Well then closing plants makes even less sence, youll have to decomission them sooner
- Retric 4y ago
  I wouldn’t be sure of that. As I understand it, nuclear power plants are limited by corrosion so the end date for decommissioning is likely based on the power plants construction date not its final date of operation. There’s regulations that lost decommissioning must finish within 60 years of shutdown, but that stuff is often flexible in practice where physics isn’t.

alexott 4y ago

Who said that people are rational? Especially in green party?

quonn 4y ago
The decision was made [0] by the CDU (government Merkel II) in 2011 right after Fukushima, not by the Green Party. Reversing it would come at a great cost [1]. Of course the Green Party also doesn‘t want to, but that boat sailed long ago. And rational, for Germany which does: - not have nuclear weapons - has far cheaper renewables in cost per kwh - is densely populated with no viable far away place to store the stuff means to quit nuclear. In the end the debate depends on whether externalities are internalized or not. If they are internalized, renewable energy wins hands down [2]. —- [0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom-Moratorium [1] Germany got sued previously for undoing an exit. It‘s predictable this would happen again. [2] As shown in the report by the scientific service of the German parliament: https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edcc0e32cb093ab073767/WD-5-005-22-pdf-data.pdf https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/887090/1867659c1d4edc...
- qwytw 4y ago
  > has far cheaper renewables in cost per kwh Currently yes. In the 80s and 90s not so much. It's huge a tragedy nuclear expansion stopped back then because nuclear was very cheap if we factor the indirect costs from burning fossil fuels (specifically premature deaths and other healthcare issues due to pollution. We basically get 2 to 8 free Chernobyls every year just by burning coal in the EU alone. Stopping climate change would just have been a free bonus).
- epups 4y ago
  Renewables are cheap, until you hit a day without a lot of Sun or wind and you start running your death-inducing coal reactors.
Krasnol 4y ago
The green party hasn't been in power for the last 16 year. Still, the conservatives didn't change anything about this. Now they're a minority in a coalition. Still, nobody did anything about it. The fact that some people (especially non-Germans) repeat this blame-show shows where it actually comes from: an misguided Astro-Turf campaign which doesn't care about facts.

this_user 4y ago

These plants are all 40 years and older, which means they are EOL or close to it anyway. You could do another costly overhaul and squeeze a few more years out of them, but the bottom line will be same.

prepend 4y ago
Why would a power plant be EOL after 40 years. These are massive capital expenditures and I would expect a planned lifespan of 100-200 years. Having a 40 year designed lifespan on something that takes 10 years to build and 10 to shut off seems really bad.
- toast0 4y ago
  The expectation when they were planned and built starting 50 years ago was that during their planned lifetime, nuclear power technology would improve significantly and they would naturaly be replaced with modern reactors at the end of their design lifetime. Of course, nobody planned for the Chernobyl disaster and the resulting lack of support for nuclear energy. Engineering wise, there are a lot of parts of the reactor that I think you have to pick between being able to service and replace the part and having it be useful and safe. So when those parts wear out, you can't really fix them. Or you have to wait so long for it to be safe to service them, that it's not worth it. Coal and gas plants don't last forever either, but they can generally be rebuilt in place, making the comparison tricky. Coal tends to release all of its radioactive waste into the air, the facility itself doesn't become a hazard to service.

Krasnol 4y ago

They're actually going to phase out coal completely by 2038. After 16 years of Merkel breaking renewables, they're being expanded again. An expansion which, in the past helped to establish this technology on this planet. Edit (since the Astro-Turf downvotes prevent me from answering to even more falsehoods being posted here...): And no, they couldn't have phased out coal completely because NO party wanted to lose voters in those regions where coal is generated. Just have a look at the name and tasks of the commission tasked with the phase out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structural_Change_and_Employment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Growth,_Structur...

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
I think the argument is that they could have phased out coal 10 years sooner, if they just left alone the nuclear plants they already had
- Krasnol 4y ago
  The argument doesn't make any sense since one has nothing to do with the other. See my edit.
throw_pm23 4y ago
2038 is far enough into the future that anything and its opposite could happen by then.
- Krasnol 4y ago
  Sure. Like a nuclear accident in one of the rotting French reactors for example. Meanwhile, the expansion of cheap renewable energy which gets better and cheaper continues to happen.
qwytw 4y ago
Well they could've have already done that by now if not a decade or two ago if they skipped the period of mass psychosis back in the 80s...

oezi 4y ago

Look to France to see what getting too reliant on Nuclear can do. Germany had a healthy mix with some nuclear and it would have made sense to keep them running until renewables power everything (which they will). But: Nuclear can't be justed bounced around on a whim. Even the Russian war in Ukraine couldn't reverse course because the powerplants weren't getting re-certified by their operators. The fact is that Germany will build 13 GW of renewables this year, which offsets those last 4 GW of Nuclear somewhat.

skywal_l 4y ago
No country* can produce its electricity only based on renewables. They are not dispatchable and occupy a lot of land. So you need a base. France decided that the base would be nuclear and Germany decided it would be fossil fuel. Not sure there is clear a cut argument that one choice is better than the other. As to what happened in France, it is not related to the nuclear technology itself and could have happen to any type of technology. They built all those power plants following the same design at the same time and all failed the same way at the same time. No surprise here. * Or maybe a country with a very small population and a lot of unused land maybe which is a pretty small category.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  > No country* can produce its electricity only based on renewables What utter bullshit. Most countries could do so.
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Could explain why it’s “bullshit?”
    - pfdietz 4y ago
      The person I was responding to qualified with "* Or maybe a country with a very small population and a lot of unused land maybe which is a pretty small category." But if you actually do the arithmetic, you will find that land constraints are not important for most countries. There's plenty of land for most countries to produce what they need (as long as they don't do something braindead like trying to burn biomass). Put it another way: the value of the energy generated per area of land is much greater than the value produced by other uses of the land, like agriculture or forestry, and no one claims those are infeasible. I believe this wrong belief about renewables not being able to do the job came from the assumption that large amounts of biofuel would be needed (IIRC MacKay's "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" made this mistake). The efficiency of sunlight => fuel from growth of biomass is very low.

simplotek 4y ago

> What I don't get about all of this is that the hard, expensive part of nuclear power is building + certifying the plants. Not really. The hard part is ensuring that nuclear can be safe throughout it's service life. This is what leads to construction process to be extremely expensive, and certification is just an umbrella term that means "checking if the plant doesn't exhibit any of the risks involving pre established problems and disaster scenarios by going through a number of checks."

qwytw 4y ago
> This is what leads to construction process to be extremely expensive That and the fact that almost all nuclear plants tend to be one-off projects nowadays unlike in the 60s and 70s (and of the plants built in the west back then are still at least 100 times "safer" than the coals plants that are currently operated when measured in the number of deaths caused, of course premature deaths due to unnecessary pollution seem to be very cheap politically..).