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Nuclear and intermitent energy sources have no place in the same sentence. Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal

Nuclear and intermitent energy sources have no place in the same sentence. Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants. How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage. Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that.

forty 1y ago
Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;) ) Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable. People barely use A/C in France by the way. > Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management. Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.
  - forty 1y ago
    People do use A/C more and more in France for obvious reasons, even in the northern part (it has been the trend in the south already for a while now). I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well. And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.
    - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      > And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero. The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction. Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.
      - forty 1y ago
        You choose to underline the issues of renewables (which are real) and to ignore the ones of nuclear, some of them I mentioned in my previous message, which indeed makes the choice easy and obvious. Taking into account all the parameters requires more head scratching.
- p2detar 1y ago
  Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0] If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing. 0 - https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-exports-nets-electricite-2024 https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-ex...
  - forty 1y ago
    I don't disagree with this point of view. Then the debate remain: should we (France) create more nuclear power plants now, or invest in reducing energy consumption and adding more renewables to the mix.
nmehner 1y ago
On short sightedness: https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-year-relationship/a-61057166 https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-5... "Several commentators, business leaders and academics have identified that 1970 deal as a significant fork in the road of the Cold War, as it established a mutual basis for economic cooperation between Russia and western Europe." There are certainly different opinions on that. Gas imports started long ago and in the cold war that approach was working to some extend. Only 13% of gas is actually used for electricity ("Stromversorgung"): https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/erdgas-absatz-und-verbrauch/ https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/erdgas-absatz... most of it was used as cheap energy source for chemical plants and other industry. > Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants. That statement is plain wrong: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&stacking=stacked_grouped https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... In 2013 about 300TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels, 92TWh from nuclear. In 2024 153TWh from fossil fuels and 0 from nuclear. So fossil fuels declined by 147TWh while nuclear only by 92TWh. Claiming that fossil fuels replaced nuclear is ridiculous, even after repeating it hundreds of times. You can claim that keeping nuclear could have sped up the transition, but the inflexible nuclear plants could also have prevented people from investing in renewables, since the economics are worse if there is energy that is supplied permanently regardless of the price. Nuclear and renewables don't mix well.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  You are entirely missing the point. The issue is what do you do when you have no renewable because it’s the winter and there is no sun and no wind. German answer to that - like it or not - is building gas fired power plants and using coal in the meanwhile. That and buying a ton of nuclear energy from France a fact you are conveniently forgetting. The ratios you quote are meaningless. The issue is that it can’t scale so as to fully decarbonise the grid. Thankfully the current German government seems to finally have seen the light.
  - rcxdude 1y ago
    'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which will slowly get pushed out of generation as the proportion of renewables and storage grows.
Archelaos 1y ago
This is all propaganda of the nuclear lobby. > Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants. Germany is constantly reducing gas consumption.[1] From 2000-2024 it reduced electricity generation from coal by 61%.[2] > How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. Only details are open. (Compared to the open question of long term storage of nuclear wast these are very minor problems.) The general strategy is clear: use constantly available renewables (offshore wind, geothermal), connect distant regions for mutual compensation, energy storage. Personally I think it neglegible if a very small percentage of fossil technology were held in reserve for emergency power generators. > At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage. We are in a transition period. It is impossible to suddenly move to complete renewables. Responsible for the rather slow progress are not those people who pushed for the switch to renewables a long time ago, but those who wanted to drag it out as long as possible. These advocates of fossil fuels were the same individuals and companies that wished to extend the use of nuclear energy. > Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Since September 2022 Germany imported no gas from Russia.[3] Meanwhile, the nuclear industries of France remains the sole buyer of enriched uranium from Russia in the EU. Admittedly, it has considerably reduced its imports from Russia itself,[4] but is still heavily dependent imports from Russia's sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).[5] The same applies to the USA.[6] > With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that. I do not deny that it is possible to operate a reasonably stable electrical network with dirty energy, apart from the regular shortages in dry summers and during heavy frosts. But Germany is ambitious and is going to show the world that it is possible to do it with clean energy. The nuclear lobbyists fear most that this will be successful. This is the only way to explain why they are attacking Germany so fiercely, even though they could actually sit back and wait to see if it succeeds. They fear for their business. [1] https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Redaktion/EN/Newsletter/2024/03/Meldung/direkt_view.html https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red... [2] https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/coal https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/coal [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-imports-from-russia/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-impor... [4] https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-reduce-russian-uranium-and-nuclear-fuel-purchases-in-2024 https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re... [5] https://en.fergana.news/news/137148/ https://en.fergana.news/news/137148/ [6] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-18/russia-continues-to-export-uranium-to-united-states https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-18/rus...

forty 1y ago

Funny story I like to tell here when nuclear chat come up: this summer (in France) they had to stop some nuclear plant because of the heat, which was causing the river used to cool the reaction to over heat. Right when people needed plenty of electricity for A/C. At least solar was there and working at it's best when we needed it ^^ (this is just for trolling the "renewable are not there when we need it" discourse ;) ) Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy. But not matter what we do, we should target using less energy, because the only clean energy is the one we don't have to produce. I think that's the thing people miss (volontarily I think) when they answer anti nuclear discourse. Insulating homes and and designing cities so that people don't have to use cars, rather than producing more and more nuclear reactors doesn't seem dumb to me, no matter what's your opinion on nuclear itself.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
France was a net exporter of electricity all summer so no idea of what you are talking about. Slowing down some nuclear plants due to this kind of external condition is fully expected. They are not stopped by the way just slowed down. Nuclear is modulable. People barely use A/C in France by the way. > Anyway, the thing we'll need for better using solar is storage, if we can make some clean ones, it will be a solution for intermittentcy Storage is a short term solution. Batteries are ok to manage intra-day variation, two days at most. Long term storage of electricity plainly doesn't exist. Saying some storage solution will somehow at some point solve the issue of intermittency is at best wishful thinking, at worst a dramatic lack of risk management. Before someone asks how China is doing it, I will answer the question: they are not. Despite China being much larger and thus being able to somehow compensate variation by having more production sites, they are using battery storage for short term variation but have to rely on expensive and polluting small thermal power plants when energy is lacking. It's a stop gap while they build a ton of nuclear power plants.
- forty 1y ago
  People do use A/C more and more in France for obvious reasons, even in the northern part (it has been the trend in the south already for a while now). I'm not sure what I said is incompatible with being a net exporter? There was a lot of sun and heat, they had to shutdown some nuclear power plants, but the overall electricy production was doing fine, because they did not have to shutdown all the plants (but how about in a few years with even hotter weather?) and obviously solar was doing well. And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Personally my intuition is that more distributed / local energy and also which doesn't have to rely on a state monopoly is better and more resilient (ask Ukraine) so I'd put my money on storage.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    > And yes, I agree we don't have good storage yet, but then we can decide to invest in finding solutions or to try to re-learn how to make nuclear power plants in less than 12 years. Things don’t magically stop at some point. Not in 2030, not in 2050, not even when we reach net zero. The question now is do we think it’s easier to reach and sustain net zero using a grid composed of renewable which we have no idea how to scale, don’t know how to manage and have no good solution for the inter-seasonal variation or using nuclear for which we already know how to do all that and we just need to scale up construction. Well, personally, I think the rational answer is clearly obvious.
    - forty 1y ago
      You choose to underline the issues of renewables (which are real) and to ignore the ones of nuclear, some of them I mentioned in my previous message, which indeed makes the choice easy and obvious. Taking into account all the parameters requires more head scratching.
p2detar 1y ago
Germany and Belgium’s net electricity imports from France for 2024 are 27 TWh, which dwarf anything imported from Germany to France. [0] If anything, this only showed that renewables and nuclear actually work very well together and relying on just one of both is shortsightedness and bad planing. 0 - https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-exports-nets-electricite-2024 https://www.rte-france.com/actualites/france-battu-record-ex...
- forty 1y ago
  I don't disagree with this point of view. Then the debate remain: should we (France) create more nuclear power plants now, or invest in reducing energy consumption and adding more renewables to the mix.

nmehner 1y ago

On short sightedness: https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-50-year-relationship/a-61057166 https://www.dw.com/en/russian-gas-in-germany-a-complicated-5... "Several commentators, business leaders and academics have identified that 1970 deal as a significant fork in the road of the Cold War, as it established a mutual basis for economic cooperation between Russia and western Europe." There are certainly different opinions on that. Gas imports started long ago and in the cold war that approach was working to some extend. Only 13% of gas is actually used for electricity ("Stromversorgung"): https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/erdgas-absatz-und-verbrauch/ https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/erdgas-absatz... most of it was used as cheap energy source for chemical plants and other industry. > Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants. That statement is plain wrong: https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&stacking=stacked_grouped https://energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE... In 2013 about 300TWh of electricity came from fossil fuels, 92TWh from nuclear. In 2024 153TWh from fossil fuels and 0 from nuclear. So fossil fuels declined by 147TWh while nuclear only by 92TWh. Claiming that fossil fuels replaced nuclear is ridiculous, even after repeating it hundreds of times. You can claim that keeping nuclear could have sped up the transition, but the inflexible nuclear plants could also have prevented people from investing in renewables, since the economics are worse if there is energy that is supplied permanently regardless of the price. Nuclear and renewables don't mix well.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
You are entirely missing the point. The issue is what do you do when you have no renewable because it’s the winter and there is no sun and no wind. German answer to that - like it or not - is building gas fired power plants and using coal in the meanwhile. That and buying a ton of nuclear energy from France a fact you are conveniently forgetting. The ratios you quote are meaningless. The issue is that it can’t scale so as to fully decarbonise the grid. Thankfully the current German government seems to finally have seen the light.
- rcxdude 1y ago
  'no sun and no wind' is not actually a thing that happens. What happens is less sun during the day and more or less wind in different places in Europe. This is a problem that can be solved through a combination of excess capacity, long distance transmission of energy, and storage, affordably and with existing technology. It's been obvious for a long time that a fully renewable grid can work, and Europe is rapidly moving towards that. Gas turbines are a reasonable stop-gap which will slowly get pushed out of generation as the proportion of renewables and storage grows.

Archelaos 1y ago

This is all propaganda of the nuclear lobby. > Germany didn't avoid nuclear by switching to renewables. It does so by burning coal and building gas-fired power plants. Germany is constantly reducing gas consumption.[1] From 2000-2024 it reduced electricity generation from coal by 61%.[2] > How to manage a grid fully on intermitent power sources is an open question. There is at this point in time no answer to this. Only details are open. (Compared to the open question of long term storage of nuclear wast these are very minor problems.) The general strategy is clear: use constantly available renewables (offshore wind, geothermal), connect distant regions for mutual compensation, energy storage. Personally I think it neglegible if a very small percentage of fossil technology were held in reserve for emergency power generators. > At the moment, Germany fires up extremely dirty power generation capacity every time there is a shortage. We are in a transition period. It is impossible to suddenly move to complete renewables. Responsible for the rather slow progress are not those people who pushed for the switch to renewables a long time ago, but those who wanted to drag it out as long as possible. These advocates of fossil fuels were the same individuals and companies that wished to extend the use of nuclear energy. > Meanwhile, all europeans bear the costs of Germany shortsightedness - as usual - since the beginning of the war in Ukraine. Since September 2022 Germany imported no gas from Russia.[3] Meanwhile, the nuclear industries of France remains the sole buyer of enriched uranium from Russia in the EU. Admittedly, it has considerably reduced its imports from Russia itself,[4] but is still heavily dependent imports from Russia's sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan).[5] The same applies to the USA.[6] > With nuclear, it's pretty clear how to run a grid. Heck, France has been doing so for decades. The question is how to build it cheaply at scale but at least we have some good ideas and experience about how to do that. I do not deny that it is possible to operate a reasonably stable electrical network with dirty energy, apart from the regular shortages in dry summers and during heavy frosts. But Germany is ambitious and is going to show the world that it is possible to do it with clean energy. The nuclear lobbyists fear most that this will be successful. This is the only way to explain why they are attacking Germany so fiercely, even though they could actually sit back and wait to see if it succeeds. They fear for their business. [1] https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Redaktion/EN/Newsletter/2024/03/Meldung/direkt_view.html https://energiewende.bundeswirtschaftsministerium.de/EWD/Red... [2] https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/coal https://www.iea.org/countries/germany/coal [3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-imports-from-russia/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1332783/german-gas-impor... [4] https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-reduce-russian-uranium-and-nuclear-fuel-purchases-in-2024 https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2025-01-eu-and-us-re... [5] https://en.fergana.news/news/137148/ https://en.fergana.news/news/137148/ [6] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-18/russia-continues-to-export-uranium-to-united-states https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2025-06-18/rus...