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>The decision to demolish Lützerath was made in accordance with the country’s new coal policy to temporarily increase the use of lignitefor electricity producti

• iab 4y ago
  I think it’s too expensive to build a dam there
• gtirloni 4y ago
  This news aside, I think the world still associates Germany with engineering excellence so, to see them abandon nuclear power for political reasons comes as a shock.
  • astrange 4y ago
    They also have a cultural fondness for green party/hippiedom unfortunately.
    • ulfw 4y ago
      Germany as a society tends to be prone to obsessions. The current one is climate. There is no other discussion in the media and politics. Nothing else important to focus on. Kids are glueing themselves onto streets because their obsessions aren't satisfied strongly enough. The brainwashing is real. Unfortunately obsessions lead to lack of wider thinking or logic.
      • cubefox 4y ago
        The irony is that our obsession with disabling nuclear power works contrary to any climate obsession. When the two are played out against each other, the anti-nuclear ambitions win. Disabling nuclear power is apparently more important than disabling coal power plants. And than dealing with soaring energy costs and a potential blackout.
      • kitkat_new 4y ago
        you really have a strange framing here, given climate change is a real threat. And fighting it isn't something that only Germany is tasked with. btw. it's not kids, but grown ups of all ages that are gluing themselves onto streets; in various countries
        • pxmpxm 4y ago
          > climate change is a real threat. I'm rather sure that not being able to afford energy - heat in the winer - is a the real existential threat to a kid in continental Europe. Worrying about sea level going up 10cm in his/her lifetime is a rich person hobby.
          • danielheath 4y ago
            > Worrying about sea level going up 10cm in his/her lifetime is a rich person hobby. Worrying about the future past next year is definitely a rich person hobby, if you define "rich" as "not imminently starving". Sea level rise is the least of the trouble. Look at fisheries decline (yield per inflation-adjusted-dollar spent has been recorded for a long time now - in spite of new tech it's been dropping for over a century), temperature-driven crop failures, increased frequency of severe storms damaging infrastructure.
          • scythe 4y ago
            Sea level is projected to rise 30 centimeters over the next 30 years. The rate is gradually accelerating, so the coming century will see more than a meter. But the primary near-term risks from climate change are heat damaging crops, (wet) heat killing humans, declining soil moisture in some regions, and increased risk of flooding along some rivers. Over two centuries, coastal cities may be inundated, but that is a long time.
          • bumby 4y ago
            Both are real risks, but humans are biased to be disproportionately sensitive to near term risks and tend to underestimate long term risks. In addition, poor people tend to be disproportionately affected.
          • 4y ago
      • rjzzleep 4y ago
        I actually think you've put your finger on the actual problem. Sometimes these obsessions lead to success, because obsession and persistence can be the same. But let's take the last year, sanctions policies that lead them to trade direct resource imports from Russia to having the same imports but paying premium through brokers like Morocco, India and Chinese LNG(all coming from Russia). Let's remember what the BASF CEO said before it escalated.[1] A lot of people in Germany were begging the government to postpone the shutdown of the remaining power plants until they have replacements, but the ideological Greens just charged ahead replacing Nuclear with Coal to achieve their ideological goal of removing nuclear. They have also been at the forefront of pushing legislation at an EU level to block nuclear in various forms.[2][3] I've seen these obsessions in various other parts of society. I've had people stand behind me waiting telling me they could not pass anywhere but where I am even though they could just take a turn around me. I've personally experienced and heard from multiple people at the CCC that their Math teachers would punish them for achieving a result with a different technique than what the teacher taught them. [1] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/basf-chef-warnt-vor-gas-embargo-schaeden-fuer-deutsche-volkswirtschaft-17925528.html https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/unternehmen/basf-chef... [2] https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2022/01/04/germany-needs-to-stop-imposing-its-failed-energy-policies-on-the-rest-of-the-eu/ https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2022/01/04/germany-needs-to-st... [3] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-pushes-nuclear-energy-eu-sanctions-next-package-2023-04-17/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-pushes-nucle...
    • Zardoz89 4y ago
      Nuclear dissolution is a CDU policy, but good job regurgitiating the rhetoric
      • prottog 4y ago
        The CDU was in power when they proposed the timelines that ended up in the closures we saw recently, but the electoral success of the Green Party in that election cycle was a key factor. Your summary is disingenuous.
      • est31 4y ago
        The original dissolution was passed as a plan during Schröder's first term, aka in the SPD/Green government, in 2002. Later, in 2010, the CDU/FDP government modified the plan and gave the power plant providers more budget. About half a year after this law has passed the Bundestag, the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident happened and a commission was established to study the security of nuclear power. Then, yes, CDU and FDP agreed upon a new plan to exit nuclear power earlier than their original extension planned, and some power plants were turned off right away. You can point your finger at the CDU, but saying that the CDU was the big driving force is disingenous. It seems that Germany's descisions on exiting nuclear power plants are always unhappily timed. First, Fukushima happens, making the extension a few months earlier look really weird. Then, the Ukraine war happens, rendering Germany's original plan moot to replace coal with natural gas from russia, and everyone is shaking their head again as Germany is keeping to the original plan.
      • zsz 4y ago
        It was the Greens who campaigned throughout the 80s and beyond to instill irrational fear in German kids in the 80s, so they would opt for an impulsive solution, instead of a rational one in subsequent decades. It was always the Greens whose very platform stood for ending nuclear power, by any means necessary. The reason why Germany today is so staunchly anti-nuclear is because that's how the Greens ("Die Gruenen") defined itself as a political party in the 80s. In fact, that was a (if not the) principal motivation for its inception. The party may seem more mainstream 30 years later, but around the 80s when they laid all the groundwork for the anti-nuclear stance of present day Germany, they were definitely a party still better known for, and even defined by their more radical members. That the current generation of voters who supported the shutdown of nuclear power production were substantially "encouraged" to adopt such views by said Greens' actions and politics when they were children and teenagers living in the 80s is incontrovertible fact. So, even if Merkel ended up as the one who executed the will of the people as head of the CDU, that will had nothing to do with CDU policy, and certainly not in the 80s and 90s. That was by definition the policy of the Greens, who also laid the groundwork for the irrational fear that Germans in their 40s and 50s have been cultivating for decades. Why can i say this with complete certainty? Because I was one of those kids.
  • bumby 4y ago
    There’s also a history of civic distrust when it comes to nuclear. After Chernobyl there was conflicting information about safe thresholds and later revisions. There’s been some write-ups stating government transparency and trust are as big of an issue as safety.
    • jones6ofMont 4y ago
      [dead]
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    > I think the world still associates Germany with engineering excellence… Do people feel that way? Their automobiles are some of the worst from an engineering perspective and the only software company I can think of is the dinosaur SAP. When I think of Germany I do not think of good engineering but rather automobiles that lose so much value so quickly because the have expensive and frequent maintenance costs and outdated software companies. Germany makes things unnecessarily complex and therefore prone to failure. It’s a cultural thing I believe. In which ways us Germany considered excellent at engineering today?
    • tbrake 4y ago
      Whoa whoa. The "association" OP speaks of is down to effective marketing - creating a common image of German product/industrial design as meticulous and high performing - not some objective engineering ranking.
      • nemo44x 4y ago
        Good point. Germans are good at marketing I guess. But very poor engineers.
        • nikau 4y ago
          It's not the engineers, it's the consumer demand for things other than depreciation and longevity.
          • nemo44x 4y ago
            Other places make performant things that have far more longevity. Japan for instance. It’s a cultural thing in Germany. I’ve spent a good deal of time there and was surprised how good at marketing they are and how bad at building. German exports of many things are of very low quality but high prices.
    • marcosdumay 4y ago
      At the electricity generation, ironically, the two well regarded players are Siemens and GE, only Siemens for its quality (what may or may not reflect the reality of the last decades, no idea).
• bboygravity 4y ago
  Germany was bought by the Russians. There's no other logical way to explain what's happening IMO. Their decisions are worse than incompetence alone.
  • nailer 4y ago
    What I would do, if I wanted to increase Germany’s reliance on Russia, is use money to ensure the voices of real German people who oppose nuclear power were amplified.
    • bboygravity 3y ago
      In my opinion it's extremely likely that this happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa... All Russia had to do is use their unlimited money (from selling gas to Germany) to buy some influence in German news papers (difficulty level: easy) and maybe pay some people to organize protests. Of course the fact that Russians bought Schroder isn't even speculation (unlike the above). To me the above is extremely likely to have happened (and probably still on-going).
  • legulere 4y ago
    How so? Germany completely got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector. It’s France that is blocking sanctions on Russian nuclear industry.
    • bboygravity 3y ago
      That's very recent isn't it? Even in the early days of Putin's war Germany was still sponsoring Putin by buying many 100's of millions of EUR of gas from him. They "got rid of Russian dependence in the energy sector" by reopening old German coal mines, firing up coal power plants and shifting gas imports from Russia to the US + importing tons of nuclear energy from France. Germany only stopped buying Russian gas for > 50% of their energy needs AFTER a war started AFTER the pipelines to Russia got bombed and AFTER they had no other choice.
    • 4y ago
• _cenw 4y ago
  We could've let the existing plants run for a while, but getting a supply chain restarted and plants recertified when the entire country is phrasing them out is not trivial, especially not on short notice. (And also, the fuel rods usually come from Russia). We also would have to get foreign workers. A lot of NPP workers went into early retirement.
• legulere 4y ago
  There is with renewables which are massively being built out. So far they completely replaced nuclear while also reducing coal power production from 45% in 2013 to 24% in 2020. By law there will be no more coal power in 2038, although 2030 or earlier is a more realistic date because of rising costs.
  • toomuchtodo 4y ago
    Germany is actually ideal for maximizing renewables because of the 12 interconnects to other electrical grids, along with their ~10GW hydro storage and ~5GW hydro. It should only take another few tens of GW to phase coal out. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany
• niemandhier 4y ago
  Storage of nuclear wast turned out to be a hard to solve problem. As of now Germany has no “Endlagerstätte”, all current wast storage sides are intermediate. The last attempt to establish a permanent storage side failed horribly and the nuclear wast that was interned there will be extracted under high costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
  • aeternum 4y ago
    No one seems to care about the nuclear radiation release from coal-fired plants.
    • midoridensha 4y ago
      Unlike nuclear waste which takes up space in barrels, coal-fired radiation and pollution isn't a problem, because it goes into the air where everyone can breathe it. This is clearly better for the environment and also human health: just ask any German environmentalist.
      • Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
        most radioactive waste created by coal power is filtered and ends up in barrels as well, and nuclear power also release radioactive waste into the atmosphere for everyone to breath, especially when looking at the whole cycle, including mining, milling and reprocessing.
        • midoridensha 4y ago
          Citation needed.
          • Jon_Lowtek 4y ago
            United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation - 2016 Report to the General Assembly - Scientific Annex B