6 ms·

Sure not. The dumbest thing we did was to slow down the expansion into renewable. Similar dumb was to make us (Germany and Europe in general) depend on Russian

by lispm 3y ago

Sure not. The dumbest thing we did was to slow down the expansion into renewable. Similar dumb was to make us (Germany and Europe in general) depend on Russian energy (gas, nuclear fuel&technology, ...), which the Russian regime then used as a weapon against us.

oezi 3y ago
It wasn't a dumb idea. It was the most rational choice to use Gas. But rationality didn't work with a madman in the Kremlin.
- lispm 3y ago
  It's not about a 'single madman', which surprised us. There were many warnings that the Russian regime was going in this direction and the German government ignored it. Even shortly before the Russian attack on the Ukraine, when the gas storage in Germany was (almost) empty and gas delivery was going down, our German government did not believe the warnings. There is nothing rational about increasing dependency on an authoritarian Russian regime, which for example invaded Crimea almost ten years ago. The aggressive Russian politics was on display. It is also not rational to, at the same time, sell critical energy infrastructure to Russian companies, like Germany did with its gas network and storage systems. Similar it was not rational to build a gas pipeline together with the Russians to even further increase the Russian potential to blackmail us.
- p1mrx 3y ago
  Burning methane is not rational if you value living in a stable climate. The atmosphere doesn't care whether it came from a democratic or autocratic country.
  - lispm 3y ago
    The idea at that time was for electricity production to replace nuclear&coal with renewable & gas (as backup) for some time, until there are other ways to backup renewable. It could (!) have had the effect of CO2 emissions going down in total.
    - mpweiher 3y ago
      Except that didn't work. And even had it worked, the emissions still would have been significantly higher than just going with nuclear.
      - oezi 3y ago
        'just going with nuclear' = just continue dreaming? Or in other words: when was this ever on the table to go just nuclear?
        mpweiher 3y ago
        It wasn't in Germany, because Germany has a well-established and well-organized anti-science movement that peddles in magic cures and irrational fears. As an example, a large percentage of the population believes in homeopathy and most of the health insurers even pay for it(!) Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false.
        lispm 3y ago
        Says the one who did not know that Fukushima had six nuclear reactors, with four of them being destroyed. Nuclear power is a lot "magically thinking". People obsessed with technical solutions are unable to see the other aspects around it: economics, safety, security, public reaction, environment, political, ... Use a spreadsheet and calculate energy needs, built times, costs, etc. and then try to get a feeling for the impact nuclear will have in the next decades compared to other energy production (coal, renewables, ...). It's not much. I've showed you in another answer the nuclear built-up over the last decades, world-wide. It stagnates mostly. https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-73df453f86db/nuclear-electricity-production-2023.png.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-7... Above are real numbers. We are far away from getting 3 times as much electricity from nuclear. Especially given that many of the reactors currently running are several decades old. In the past 35 years nuclear has not expanded at all in west&central europe. Just holding that seems to be a challenge. For a long time the German engineers lobbied for new nuclear technology. One of the ideas was the brilliant pebble-bed reactor. We build one. It later died a silent death, because it did not work in the real world (maintenance was too costly) and the industry was closing it. We were involved in the EPR (-> Siemens). Which is mostly a failure. > Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false. Others will say that about your opinions. I have yet failed to see a convincing argument from you, just the old stuff like that nuclear fuel has not been used to its potential. We heard that argument ten years ago. Twenty years ago. Nothing has happened. How many re-processing plants have been built in Western/Middle Europe in the last twenty years? None. The UK can't even clean up the one it has. What happened to the Thorium reactors? HN was full of news about them. What happened to the Small Modular Reactors? Where are they, beyond the ones used in the military? Too expensive. The technical solutions to make renewable large scale viable are an order of magnitude simpler than the "next nuclear technology" to be developed. Plus they will be easier to deploy. What is Japan doing with its Plutonium from reprocessing nuclear fuel? https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-misguided-plutonium-policy https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-mis... A bunch of countries would be happy to get nuclear technology under the idea that it is to "save the earth", while at the same time they'll want the option for nuclear weapons. In the middle east we have Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran is working for a long time on that, while claiming to develop nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation That's another reason why a world with lots of countries with nuclear technology is not desirable.
- Dolototo 3y ago
  [flagged]
- mpweiher 3y ago
  It was a "rational" decision in the context of the previous decision, the renewables push. Pro Tip: if doing something really dumb has becomes the most rational choice in some situation, examine the decisions leading to that situation. They may not have been optimal.
  - lispm 3y ago
    Applies to nuclear, too. Check your own bias.
    - mpweiher 3y ago
      Except nuclear isn't dumb. Nuclear is a reliable source. >90% capacity factor. Downtime almost always planned and scheduled. Wind/Solar are not reliable. They are intermittent and not schedulable. The provide power when the weather permits. For example right now we have a storm in Germany, but it is holiday seasons, with electricity demand low. All that wind energy and nowhere to go. In order to make intermittent sources viable, you need backup. So in addition to having to vastly overprovision the EEs themselves (due to the 15% capacity factor), you need to additionally provision non-EE backup power generation. Which then sits around idly until needed. How many times are we supposed to overprovision to make intermittent source viable?!? It's a pretty non-sensical plan, but at least it's a plan. Except for one minor detail: the backup power generators are fossil fuel based. Preferably gas. So in addition to the idiocy of having to double up your energy generating infrastructure (intermittent primary, schedulable backup), that backup is not CO2 free. Oh, and there's a little bit of a geopolitical problem as well. Wouldn't it be better if the backup were not fossil fuel based? Well, I'm glad you asked: yes it absolutely would! Except we don't have many of those, except nuclear. Except nuclear doesn't really make sense as a "backup". Because it already produces carbon free electricity, and like PV/Wind, its operating costs are low, it just makes sense to keep it on all the time. And since it is actually reliable, not intermittent like PV/Wind, you actually can keep it on all the time. And then you just don't need the "primary", because the "backup" is superior in all respects. Well apart from ideology.
      - 3y ago
mpweiher 3y ago
Sure so. Renewables are not a complete solution, you need a backup for when the wind down't blow and the sun don't shine. That backup was going to be Russian gas. Oops. Even in the best of cases, that's just not good for the climate. And you make yourself dependent on a tyrant. And that tyrant then miscalculates, thinking he can blackmail you into not supporting the country he wants to invade. And thus he invades. With nuclear you need...nothing else. So what we should have done is build out nuclear energy like crazy, starting the same time we started our push into renewables. Because then we would have been done by now, instead of half-way done with the 2nd dirtiest electricity at the 2nd highest prices in the EU. That's what we should have done. But turning off perfectly fine reactors that have already been paid for and are producing tons of CO2 free electricity in a so-called "climate emergency" is incompetence that's indistinguishable from malice.
- zmix 3y ago
  > Renewables are not a complete solution, you need a backup for when the wind down't blow and the sun don't shine. You can't just switch off and oon a nuclear plant. It is not good as a backup solution. > But turning off perfectly fine reactors that have already been paid for and are producing tons of CO2 free electricity in a so-called "climate emergency" is incompetence that's indistinguishable from malice. Well, while this is by no means scientifically sound, between 2011 (the year Merkel decided to get rid of the nuclear power plants) and 1954 (the year the first such power plant got available for civilian production) there were two worst accidents and one half. Using this data there was a catastrophic accident every 22.8 years, luckily not in our neighbourhood.
  - mpweiher 3y ago
    > You can't just switch off and oon a nuclear plant. It is not good as a backup solution. That turns out not to be the case. For example, the French stations are built so they can easily manage a much larger range. However, this is backwards. Or as I put it elsewhere: if the logical choice in a particular situation is a really stupid choice, you need to examine the decisions that got you in that situation. Although turning nuclear power plants on and off again is possible, it is stupid. Just keep them running! The illogical choice that gets you in the situation that nuclear is "a bad fit" is making an unreliable, unpredictably intermittent power source your primary. That just makes no sense whatsoever. > two worst accidents and one half. 1. Even with those accidents, nuclear is still among the safest power sources. 2. The negative effects of the accidents were far less than is generally assumed in the wider public. 3. The Tchernobyl reactor was inherently unstable. We don't have any inherently unstable reactors in the West. And last I checked the RMBK-1000 was retrofitted to no longer have the instability. And Ukraine is not just keeping nuclear power, but is among the states that have pledged to expand it 3-fold. 4. The Fukushima reactor was damaged by an unprecedented Tsunami that killed 15000 people. Whereas the reactor accident itself killed zero. We don't have Tsunmais in Europe, and if we ever get one, the reactors will be our smallest problems. Just like the reactor was the smallest problem with the Tsunami in Japan. Oh, and Japan has also pledged to expand its nuclear generating capacity 3-fold. 5. The deadliest accident of a power-generating technology was a dam that broke in China in 1975. It killed >15000 people, destroyed upwards of 4 million homes and displaced 11 million people. Not only did no country whatsoever get out of hydro-power, the accident is virtually unknown in the West. 6. The Bhopal chemical accident killed upwards of 4000 people and injured half a million. No country disbanded their chemical industry as a result.
jimbobthrowawy 3y ago
Isn't using gas for energy more replaceable than the amount of gas that's needed for chemical feedstock for germany's huge chemical industry?

by lispm 3y ago

oezi 3y ago

It wasn't a dumb idea. It was the most rational choice to use Gas. But rationality didn't work with a madman in the Kremlin.

lispm 3y ago
It's not about a 'single madman', which surprised us. There were many warnings that the Russian regime was going in this direction and the German government ignored it. Even shortly before the Russian attack on the Ukraine, when the gas storage in Germany was (almost) empty and gas delivery was going down, our German government did not believe the warnings. There is nothing rational about increasing dependency on an authoritarian Russian regime, which for example invaded Crimea almost ten years ago. The aggressive Russian politics was on display. It is also not rational to, at the same time, sell critical energy infrastructure to Russian companies, like Germany did with its gas network and storage systems. Similar it was not rational to build a gas pipeline together with the Russians to even further increase the Russian potential to blackmail us.
p1mrx 3y ago
Burning methane is not rational if you value living in a stable climate. The atmosphere doesn't care whether it came from a democratic or autocratic country.
- lispm 3y ago
  The idea at that time was for electricity production to replace nuclear&coal with renewable & gas (as backup) for some time, until there are other ways to backup renewable. It could (!) have had the effect of CO2 emissions going down in total.
  - mpweiher 3y ago
    Except that didn't work. And even had it worked, the emissions still would have been significantly higher than just going with nuclear.
    - oezi 3y ago
      'just going with nuclear' = just continue dreaming? Or in other words: when was this ever on the table to go just nuclear?
      - mpweiher 3y ago
        It wasn't in Germany, because Germany has a well-established and well-organized anti-science movement that peddles in magic cures and irrational fears. As an example, a large percentage of the population believes in homeopathy and most of the health insurers even pay for it(!) Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false.
        lispm 3y ago
        Says the one who did not know that Fukushima had six nuclear reactors, with four of them being destroyed. Nuclear power is a lot "magically thinking". People obsessed with technical solutions are unable to see the other aspects around it: economics, safety, security, public reaction, environment, political, ... Use a spreadsheet and calculate energy needs, built times, costs, etc. and then try to get a feeling for the impact nuclear will have in the next decades compared to other energy production (coal, renewables, ...). It's not much. I've showed you in another answer the nuclear built-up over the last decades, world-wide. It stagnates mostly. https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-73df453f86db/nuclear-electricity-production-2023.png.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/getmedia/332179b1-b865-47cc-a239-7... Above are real numbers. We are far away from getting 3 times as much electricity from nuclear. Especially given that many of the reactors currently running are several decades old. In the past 35 years nuclear has not expanded at all in west&central europe. Just holding that seems to be a challenge. For a long time the German engineers lobbied for new nuclear technology. One of the ideas was the brilliant pebble-bed reactor. We build one. It later died a silent death, because it did not work in the real world (maintenance was too costly) and the industry was closing it. We were involved in the EPR (-> Siemens). Which is mostly a failure. > Similarly, what the German public "knows" about nuclear power is mostly patently and even ridiculously false. Others will say that about your opinions. I have yet failed to see a convincing argument from you, just the old stuff like that nuclear fuel has not been used to its potential. We heard that argument ten years ago. Twenty years ago. Nothing has happened. How many re-processing plants have been built in Western/Middle Europe in the last twenty years? None. The UK can't even clean up the one it has. What happened to the Thorium reactors? HN was full of news about them. What happened to the Small Modular Reactors? Where are they, beyond the ones used in the military? Too expensive. The technical solutions to make renewable large scale viable are an order of magnitude simpler than the "next nuclear technology" to be developed. Plus they will be easier to deploy. What is Japan doing with its Plutonium from reprocessing nuclear fuel? https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-misguided-plutonium-policy https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2018-10/features/japan’s-mis... A bunch of countries would be happy to get nuclear technology under the idea that it is to "save the earth", while at the same time they'll want the option for nuclear weapons. In the middle east we have Israel with nuclear weapons. Iran is working for a long time on that, while claiming to develop nuclear power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_proliferation That's another reason why a world with lots of countries with nuclear technology is not desirable.
Dolototo 3y ago
[flagged]
mpweiher 3y ago
It was a "rational" decision in the context of the previous decision, the renewables push. Pro Tip: if doing something really dumb has becomes the most rational choice in some situation, examine the decisions leading to that situation. They may not have been optimal.
- lispm 3y ago
  Applies to nuclear, too. Check your own bias.
  - mpweiher 3y ago
    Except nuclear isn't dumb. Nuclear is a reliable source. >90% capacity factor. Downtime almost always planned and scheduled. Wind/Solar are not reliable. They are intermittent and not schedulable. The provide power when the weather permits. For example right now we have a storm in Germany, but it is holiday seasons, with electricity demand low. All that wind energy and nowhere to go. In order to make intermittent sources viable, you need backup. So in addition to having to vastly overprovision the EEs themselves (due to the 15% capacity factor), you need to additionally provision non-EE backup power generation. Which then sits around idly until needed. How many times are we supposed to overprovision to make intermittent source viable?!? It's a pretty non-sensical plan, but at least it's a plan. Except for one minor detail: the backup power generators are fossil fuel based. Preferably gas. So in addition to the idiocy of having to double up your energy generating infrastructure (intermittent primary, schedulable backup), that backup is not CO2 free. Oh, and there's a little bit of a geopolitical problem as well. Wouldn't it be better if the backup were not fossil fuel based? Well, I'm glad you asked: yes it absolutely would! Except we don't have many of those, except nuclear. Except nuclear doesn't really make sense as a "backup". Because it already produces carbon free electricity, and like PV/Wind, its operating costs are low, it just makes sense to keep it on all the time. And since it is actually reliable, not intermittent like PV/Wind, you actually can keep it on all the time. And then you just don't need the "primary", because the "backup" is superior in all respects. Well apart from ideology.
    - 3y ago

mpweiher 3y ago

Sure so. Renewables are not a complete solution, you need a backup for when the wind down't blow and the sun don't shine. That backup was going to be Russian gas. Oops. Even in the best of cases, that's just not good for the climate. And you make yourself dependent on a tyrant. And that tyrant then miscalculates, thinking he can blackmail you into not supporting the country he wants to invade. And thus he invades. With nuclear you need...nothing else. So what we should have done is build out nuclear energy like crazy, starting the same time we started our push into renewables. Because then we would have been done by now, instead of half-way done with the 2nd dirtiest electricity at the 2nd highest prices in the EU. That's what we should have done. But turning off perfectly fine reactors that have already been paid for and are producing tons of CO2 free electricity in a so-called "climate emergency" is incompetence that's indistinguishable from malice.

zmix 3y ago
> Renewables are not a complete solution, you need a backup for when the wind down't blow and the sun don't shine. You can't just switch off and oon a nuclear plant. It is not good as a backup solution. > But turning off perfectly fine reactors that have already been paid for and are producing tons of CO2 free electricity in a so-called "climate emergency" is incompetence that's indistinguishable from malice. Well, while this is by no means scientifically sound, between 2011 (the year Merkel decided to get rid of the nuclear power plants) and 1954 (the year the first such power plant got available for civilian production) there were two worst accidents and one half. Using this data there was a catastrophic accident every 22.8 years, luckily not in our neighbourhood.
- mpweiher 3y ago
  > You can't just switch off and oon a nuclear plant. It is not good as a backup solution. That turns out not to be the case. For example, the French stations are built so they can easily manage a much larger range. However, this is backwards. Or as I put it elsewhere: if the logical choice in a particular situation is a really stupid choice, you need to examine the decisions that got you in that situation. Although turning nuclear power plants on and off again is possible, it is stupid. Just keep them running! The illogical choice that gets you in the situation that nuclear is "a bad fit" is making an unreliable, unpredictably intermittent power source your primary. That just makes no sense whatsoever. > two worst accidents and one half. 1. Even with those accidents, nuclear is still among the safest power sources. 2. The negative effects of the accidents were far less than is generally assumed in the wider public. 3. The Tchernobyl reactor was inherently unstable. We don't have any inherently unstable reactors in the West. And last I checked the RMBK-1000 was retrofitted to no longer have the instability. And Ukraine is not just keeping nuclear power, but is among the states that have pledged to expand it 3-fold. 4. The Fukushima reactor was damaged by an unprecedented Tsunami that killed 15000 people. Whereas the reactor accident itself killed zero. We don't have Tsunmais in Europe, and if we ever get one, the reactors will be our smallest problems. Just like the reactor was the smallest problem with the Tsunami in Japan. Oh, and Japan has also pledged to expand its nuclear generating capacity 3-fold. 5. The deadliest accident of a power-generating technology was a dam that broke in China in 1975. It killed >15000 people, destroyed upwards of 4 million homes and displaced 11 million people. Not only did no country whatsoever get out of hydro-power, the accident is virtually unknown in the West. 6. The Bhopal chemical accident killed upwards of 4000 people and injured half a million. No country disbanded their chemical industry as a result.

jimbobthrowawy 3y ago

Isn't using gas for energy more replaceable than the amount of gas that's needed for chemical feedstock for germany's huge chemical industry?