dismantling self-sufficiency and hastening climate change speedrun
Germany (or germ money as I call it) is the perfect example of why nuclear doesn’t work in capitalism. Nuclear energy could provide mostly clean and mostly safe energy for ridicoulosley cheap, but its so cheap that doesn’t always generate profits, and as such they’re shutting them down, on a system without the profit motive we could use nuclear (along with other sources, of course nuclear has its problems) to provide cheap if not free electricity (that should be a human right by now, its really hard to live without nowadays) to all of umaniry, but instead we prefer to give all those juicy extraprofits to energy CEOs and stockholders
but its so cheap that doesn’t always generate profits
This doesn’t even make sense, since the alternative is buying oil from Russia
Nuclear is only “cheap” after the reactors are built (back then with huge state subsidies). The reactors in Germany were scheduled for decommissioning due to age and the government did not want to invest in new reactors. From a commercial perspective the construction of reactors without subsides doesn’t make sense any longer as renewables + storage are much cheaper and thus more profitable.
This conveniently leaves out that the former & regional governments have been intentionally sabotaging wind and solar energy installations (and energy transfer capacity) on a massive scale in the last 15+ years.
I don’t know why people keep pretending that wind and solar are some magic bullet. Both have lots of problems of their own, and it’s certainly not clear that they can provide energy production backbone for an industrial nation. There’s a reason China is a leader in both nuclear and renewables. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.
I have no proof but I wouldn’t be surprised if the coal industry was indirectly lobbying for renewables. “Renewable energy” might have been the final nail in the coffin to make earth succumb to pollution while nuclear was somehow ignored.
Actual fridge temp IQs still repeating narratives about nuclear safety and nuclear waste are possibly the most environmentally damaging groups of the 21st century.
There’s a bunch of fossil fuel money going into “renewables” and anti nuclear campaigns, has been from the beginning. Oil companies are also getting into the renewables game, in part as an additional revenue stream, in part because renewables complement gas infrastructure, and likely in part because renewable subsidies are quite generous.
I recommend reading this: https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-is-too-slow
The reactors built in the 1970ties had massive delays and costs overruns making it politically nearly impossible to justify new constructions. One can argue (as the article does) that this isn’t inherent to the technology itself (but it conveniently leaves out examples of massive cost overruns and delays from this millennium), but this is what mostly killed nuclear power in the west.
They are not (a magic bullet), but indirectly claiming (as you do in the OP) that the choice is either nuclear or coal (& gas) is highly misleading, and the main reason why Germany is not able to reduce their coal mining is because they bet on cheap gas for electricity production (which was meant to replace the coal). Nuclear was never a vital part of the German energy mix, and shutting down decades old reactors that were scheduled for decommissioning anyway did not make any significant difference. For nuclear to make a difference they would have had to start constructing new reactors 10+ years ago, but they rather built new gas plants.
Nuclear was never a vital part of German energy mix because Germany was predominantly reliant on cheap energy from Russia. The choice was never between nuclear and renewables, both were just lip service while Germany kept guzzling fossils to fuel its industry. And if nuclear can’t be built fast enough now, there’s little chance renewables can.
The key point is that Germany never had any interest in moving off fossils, and now it’s doubling down on coal like it’s the height of 19th century.
This is not true. Germany was reliant on coal (locally mined lignite and imported regular coal) and in the last 20 years or so they made the deliberate decision to try and replace the coal with natural gas.
In the early 2000 they were on a good track to replace a large percentage of the coal electricity production with solar and wind energy, but then the new conservative government under Merkel took power and deliberately killed that off to please their big business energy producers. That was a purely political choice and technically it would have been perfectly feasible to switch to near 100% renewables for electricity production if the installation capacity would have been retained.
I’d like to see actual sources showing total energy consumption in Germany, including all the industry, and how that would be met with 100% renewables today even if the plans from 2000 weren’t shelved.
Germany has hit something like 50%* renewable energy production (averaged over a full year), thanks to the €600B+ Energiewende (“energy turn”). This causes a bunch of problems. A big one is grid instability. By subsidizing rooftop solar so much, grid operators often need to pay neighbouring countries to take additional electricity in the early afternoon. During peak load in the mornings and evenings, as well as overnight, the German grid often gets lots of power from those same neighbouring countries. They have higher baseload capacities and can fill the dips between German supply and load. There is basically no storage capacity to speak of to help with these supply/demand gaps. Pumped hydro is all but a no-go due to NIMBYs and environmental protection. Hydrogen generation hasn’t qualified for subsidies and has had to pay the renewables surcharge on electricity, making it too expensive.
Germany also pressures France to drop nuclear, even though the southern Rhine region (big industrial areas) rely on French nuclear to keep the lights on. The Swiss succumbed to German pressure to phase out nuclear. Both countries will be decommissioning reactors well before their> best-before dates. We can only hope that Poland and Czechia don’t succumb to this same pressure to scrap their nuclear plans.
/* It’s also worth noting what Germany and the EU count as renewable. Much of this 50% renewable production (up to 40% if I’m not mistaken) comes from “biomass.” This biomass is in large part wood pellets, which used to be sourced from European sawmill and forestry scraps. Then it got labeled as renewable and valid for subsidies, meaning demand quickly outpaced supply. Who stepped up to meet this newfound wood demand but the US. They plant some quickly growing trees, cut them down as soon as possible, throw them in a shredder, glue and compress them into pellets, and ship them across the Atlantic where the Germans and others burn them. This whole process emits about as much CO2 as coal, yet per EU regulation is CO2 neutral, as the tree ostensibly absorbed just as much CO2 when it was growing as is released by burning.
Yeah, the whole policy is completely incoherent.
I very specifically stated electricity production. Full replacement is sadly not possible as long as the structure of society is as it is. Please learn to read :p
You do realize that industry relies on electricity production. In fact, industry tends to account for far higher electricity consumption than domestic use.
Saying the reactors were scheduled for decommissioning anyway isn’t the whole truth and is quite misleading. It was agreed in various private-public meetings and legislative sessions between 2000 and 2010 that the reactors would be decommissioned between 2020 and 2036. The most recent agreement confirming this was reached in 2010 by a Merkel lead government.
Not six months later Fukushima happened. Germany and Merkel (with an academic background in nuclear physics) had a panic attack, and all of a sudden the execution order was fast-tracked: date of death, 31.12.2022. Given the current energy situation a stay of execution was granted to the three remaining reactors until 15.04.2023.
