Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo… then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?
Installed Wind Capacty - Germany
Growth in german wind capacity is slowing. Soo… then the plan is to keep on with lignite and gas? Am I missing something?
Installed Wind Capacty - Germany
Yes, basically. Germany completely folded on nuclear to appease pretend environmental groups that actually know nothing about the environment and then went all in on coal again while pretending they were going all in on renewables. But now that even the renewables numbers are flat-lining, they have to keep up the charade by continuing to make negative comments about nuclear.
They’re helped along by idiots like Blake elsewhere in this comment section. Because, sure, new nuclear is expensive, but that’s not the problem here. The problem was shutting down all the nuclear they already had.
Compared to nuclear, renewables are:
Why would anyone waste money on the worse option? An analogy: you need lunch and you can choose between a nutritious and tasty $5 sandwich from an independent deli or a $10 expensive mass-produced sandwich from a chain. The independent deli is tastier, cheaper, more filling, and healthier, and it’s easier for you to get since it’s on your way to work. Why would you ever get the $10 sandwich?
According to you, I’m an idiot, and yet no one has debunked a single one of my arguments. No one has even tried to, they immediately crumple like a tissue as soon as they’re asked directly to disprove the FACT that nuclear is more expensive, slower to provision and more environmentally damaging than renewables. If I’m so stupid it should be pretty easy to correct my errors?
Either that or you can loftily declare yourself above this argument, state that I am somehow moving the goalposts, say that “there’s no point, I’ll never change your mind” or just somehow express some amount of increduiity at my absolutely abhorrent behaviour by asking you such a straightforward question? You may also choose “that’s not the question I want to talk about, we should answer MY questions instead!”
Tell me how much energy it provides during night and during winter. Thats’s why. Coal plant produces more radioactive waste than nuclear power plant. And that feared CO2 too.
We need to change how power distribution works. That’s just the point. There are easy ways to store power that’s generated by day. And since we don’t just focus on one single renewable energy source, it’s not even half as bad as you’re drawing the picture here.
Edit: since this is my only comment in here, I also want to point out that the chart is rising last year, I think/hope that it will continue rising. (Until CDU steps in again because people think “Hey there last years were so terrible, everything got more pricy and so on, that’s definitely on SPD, green, FDP, not just a random situation in the Ukraine” and vote for them…)
Tell me you are totally brain-washed without telling me you are totally brain-washed.
The correct take: Coal plants without any environmental requirements 50-60 years ago release more radiation into the area in the form of fly ash (containing natural amounts of radiation like all earth around you) than the radiation escaping from a modern nuclear power plant through it’s massive concrete hull.
Or in other worlds: If nothing goes wrong and we completely ignore the actual radioactive waste produced (of which a coal plant obviously produces zero) then the radiation levels in the area around the plant are miniscule and it’s really safe. So safe indeed that just the redistribtion of natural radiation via ash when coal is burned has a slightly stronger effect.
That’s it. That’s the actual gist of the study that is from the 1970s (referencing even older data).
Just the fact that this fairy tale about coal power producing radioactive waste based on some (already then criticised and flawed) old study is still going around shows how lobbyists have damaged your brains.
Silverseren: Germany made a foolish choice shutting down their nukes
Blake: Renewables are a deli sandwich
The room: …?
Sorry if the analogy was too hard for you. Feel free to ignore it and address the remaining 90% of the comment which was not an analogy.
Why would I do that? You’ve made it clear that you don’t read people’s comments. Instead of reading and responding, you copy paste from thead to thread the same disjointed bullet points.
I have read absolutely every single word you have written and responded to them in kind. After your last comment, I went back over the thread from beginning to end and my conversation with you was lucid and coherent the entire way through.
I do appreciate the attempt at gaslighting, though. It’s a good feeling knowing that I’m having such a strong impact that you’re willing to try and psychologically manipulate someone.
Anyways, look, drop me a line, if you’ll send some of that sweet sweet nuclear lobby money my way I’m sure it would be a very worthwhile investment for your company or think tank or what-not. I have reasonable rates and give good results!
Are you hallucinating? What part of your comments do you think was ignored?
Because it certainly seems like you got your ass handed to you in this thread by someone who had the knowledge and could back it up with sources.
And your general framing of the issue, ommitance of the stong uptick in new renewables after the new government took power pisses me off as a german.
I’m taking about another thread in this post.
The criticism is extraordinarily simple and justified.
Which is better, Renewables and Nuclear or Renewables and Fossil Fuels?
Germany could have had an almost entirely fossil free grid by now, but instead they chose renewables & fossil fuels.
Please provide a source for your claim that 100% renewable energy is not possible.
Actually you can save yourself the time, because here’s two sources which show it is possible.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261920316639?via%3Dihub
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-05843-2
Or (as this is in the context of Germany) one of the studies even modeling different acceptance levels of renewable energy in the transitioning until 2050:
https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-to-a-climate-neutral-energy-system.html
I think you replied to the wrong comment by accident lol
No, I didn’t. You claimed that the choice was between either renewables and coal or renewables and nuclear. I am asking you to prove your claim that renewables are not a stand-alone option.
I did not claim that, I suspect that you misunderstood something.
I’ll clarify what I meant for your benefit. Germany has constructed a lot of new renewable power in the past two decades, which is great, but they prioritized shutting down nuclear power plants instead of fossil fuelled power. Because of this, they still get ~50% of their electricity from fossil fuels, which is not so great.
If they instead had prioritized phasing out fossil fuelled power plants, that number would’ve been more like 20-30%, and more crucially, they could’ve phased out their entire fleet of coal power plants. Ergo, criticism of German energy policy is entirely justified.
You replied to my comment. My comment simply stated that investing in building nuclear power plants is a waste of money that is better spent on renewables. You said that criticism of my comment was justified because Germany could choose between either renewables and coal, or renewables in Nuclear. I am asking you to support your claim. I am not inviting you to move the goalposts. If you replied to my comment and said criticism of my comment was justified and then started talking about something else unrelated to my comment then I don’t really know what to tell you?
…and your comment replied to one criticising German energy policy, hence the context of “the criticism being justified”. The bad policy decisions have already been made (from 2005-current) and it does seem like Germany will be stuck with coal power for quite some time because of their poor policymaking.
The question was not about the price of building new nuclear power, but of maintaining old plants, and existing nuclear) power provides incredibly cheap, green energy. Simply put, my “claim” as you want to put it, Germany could have rid themselves of coal power with the help of the VRE they invested ln, but instead shut down their old nucler plants. The “proof” is no more difficult than studying their energy profile for the past 20 yrs.
In hindsight, the OC was somewhat rude towards you in particular, which I don’t agree with, but alas.
Anyway, you seem to want to discuss future electricity solutions rather than the existing one, and I’d happily have a separate discussion on what mix of green energy sources ought to be used, if you’d like.
IMO based on what I have read over the years, optimal green energy mixes land on 40-70% VRE depending on regional climate factors, with the rest filled out by dispatchable sources such as hydropower, geothermal, biomass and nuclear power plants.
(I am German, so please excuse my grammar mistakes. If you are a German, too, the humanist party has a great position paper on nuclear energy: https://www.pdh.eu/programmatik/kernenergie/)
While reading your list, several points stood out for me.
I assume you are talking about the inherent costs of the technology, but that is not where the costs come from. Nuclear power plants are not mass produced and there is constantly changing regulation. The petrol lobby is partly to blame for that, as they have a strong interest in making building nuclear power plants difficult and expensive. https://thebulletin.org/2019/06/why-nuclear-power-plants-cost-so-much-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/ https://progress.institute/nuclear-power-plant-construction-costs/
https://www.blog.geoffrussell.com.au/post/nuclear-may-or-may-not-be-expensive-but-it-s-much-faster-to-build-than-renewables
Additionally, the low hanging fruits (the places that can easily be used for windparks) were already picked in Germany. It’s becoming more and more difficult to find more places where windparks can be built.
That stood out as especially weird. How did you come to that conclusion? If you are referring to nuclear waste: “Nuclear power causes least damage to the environment, finds systematic survey” https://techxplore.com/news/2023-04-nuclear-power-environment-systematic-survey.html
“Why I Don’t Worry About Nuclear Waste” https://archive.ph/ZJQCj or, if you prefer some informational tweets by the same author: https://twitter.com/MadiHilly/status/1550148385931513856.
Last but not least, I highly recommend this book (I’ve read it, but it’s German): “Atommüll - Ungelöstes, unlösbares Problem ?: Technisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Aspekte der Endlagerung hochaktiven Atommülls. Ein Versuch zur Versachlichung der Debatte.” https://www.amazon.com/-/de/dp/B09JX2ZRB3/
Also, take into account the land usage.
Non-issue. Nuclear fuel is virtually inexhaustible and will last us literally until the sun explodes. https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/nuclear-fission-fuel-is-inexhaustible/1257
https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html
You might also be interested in the discussion on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36744699
Haven’t you heard about small modular reactors (SMR)? One prominent company is Oklo (named after the natural nuclear reactor), another is Nuscale https://www.nuscalepower.com.
Also, we have vessels that are powered by nuclear reactors since several decades.
I assumed the data was well known: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh With newer designs (“walk-away safety”) the nuclear death rate will likely continue to fall.
I tend to agree here. My main argument against nuclear power is the ongoing competence crisis. We need people that can maintain these plants for decades, but education and scientific literacy are in decline, while ideologies and social conflicts are on the rise. That is not a good environment for radioactive material with malicious use cases.
Could you elaborate?
How? Solar and wind have fluctuating production. One main challenge with solar is to get rid of excess electricity quickly, before it damages the grid. Germany already PAYS other countries to use their electric power on sunny days (i. e. the electricity cost becomes negative). That problem will become much worse. Plus, when it is sunny in Germany, it is likely sunny in surrounding countries, too, so they will have the same problem. There is a great talk by Hans-Werner Sinn touching this topic (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5trsBP9Cn4, see 23:04).
I am not favoring nuclear energy, btw.
Thanks for the reply, it means a lot that you’re willing to engage with my actual arguments.
When I say cheaper, I refer to a metric known as TCOE - total cost of electricity. It represents all of the various costs required to put a kWh of electrical energy onto the grid.
Regulatory controls obviously are a major factor to the cost of nuclear, but we can’t just waive all regulation to get cheaper electricity, that would be incredibly dangerous.
The thing is, with renewables, once they’re built, they continue to generate electricity for many, many years and require no fuel. Whereas nuclear power requires that a material be extracted from the ground, refined, handled and stored to very precise specifications, and then the waste products from that also have to be managed in a very particular (and expensive) way. You’re essentially arguing that nuclear could be cheaper than renewables if we removed ideological barriers to nuclear, but that’s just not true. Nuclear has very expensive costs associated with it that will mean it’s always more expensive than renewables. The gap will only widen with time as we get better at producing the renewables, too.
For your faster to provision article, it’s truly mind-boggling what the author writes. Did you actually read it or did you just copy-paste links)? Do you actually agree with everything written in that article?
The author has many cherry-picked examples, such as comparing how much electricity supply was added in a single year for various countries. That comparison obviously favours nuclear, because a nuclear power plant takes decades to build, but the year it comes online it provides a huge glut of (expensive) electrical supply. The obvious response to that graph is to divide each installation by the number of years needed to provision it. I checked that out manually for a few of the nuclear plants mentioned in the article and the energy gains essentially vanish into meaninglessness.
Also, maybe it’s a bit of an unfair criticism but the line where he wrote “Why does a nuclear power plant need multiple coolers for the reactor? An aeroplane only has one!” was one of the dumbest things I have ever read in my life.
No it isn’t. At present, 0.8% of German land area is used by wind farms and there are plans to increase that to 2%. For comparison, agricultural land uses over 50% of the land. Feel free to provide a source for your claim though.
For less environmentally damaging - there are a lot of factors. The us bconcrete, the use of water, extraction of uranium, the biodiversity loss of clearing land for a power plant, the large amount of industrial processes and traffic to commission. Same to operate. Same to decommission. The handling of waste products. The irradiation of water. The co2e emissions of nuclear. I could go on and on.
Your archive link didn’t work and I don’t use Twitter. But I’m not particularly interested in the biased opinion of individuals either way. The environmental impact of nuclear is a well known issue. If you want more information you can just look it up.
I don’t speak German but I did Google around and found this, translated from the German wiki:
The memorandum was partly criticized. According to the Green Party politician Hans-Josef Fell , the CO 2 savings potential is massively overestimated [26] , as the journalist Wolfgang Pomrehn calculates at Telepolis [27] , he only states a maximum initial savings potential of 4% of annual emissions . A publication by the IPPNW also accuses the authors of ignoring the study situation and market developments by claiming that there is only one alternative between fossil and nuclear power generation
Your book is written by a guy employed by the nuclear industry. That isn’t going to be an unbiased view exactly, is it?
Nothing is infinite, so that’s a dumb claim right out the gate.
“identified uranium resources [would last] roughly 230-year supply at today’s consumption rate in total”. Including undiscovered sources. I don’t need to tell you that todays current consumption of nuclear power is really, really low in comparison to other forms of energy, approximately 10%. If we used even 30%, that 240 years becomes 80 years.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
Breeder reactors aren’t available and can be dismissed the same way cold fusion is. Worth investing in research in case it’s useful in the future but for now it is not viable.
For decentralisation - smaller reactors is more decentralised but even more expensive and higher environmental impact per kWh. And it’s still less decentralised than renewables.
Even your own link shows that renewables are as safe or safer than nuclear, dude, what the fuck are you thinking about. Additionally, the sources of the data on fatalities caused by renewables are the most ridiculously cherry picked examples I have ever seen, you should look up the paper as it’s genuinely hilarious. And looking exclusively at death rates per kWh is not exactly the whole picture. When it comes to accidents, according to Benjamin Sovacool, nuclear power plants rank first in terms of their economic cost, accounting for 41 percent of all property damage, more than even fossil fuel plants. I couldn’t find information on the number of injuries but I’d bet any amount of money that nuclear causes more injuries than renewables.
More reliable - it’s kind of a “sum of its parts” thing. The sun is always there, so is the wind and the waves and the oceans and geothermal energy. If we don’t have one of those then we’re all fucked anyways. Uranium is a resource which can run out, have shortages, have breakages in the supply chain, and so on. Fewer accidents, less of a target for people who want to disrupt it, if a bunch of them are destroyed in an earthquake then it wouldn’t cause huge disruption, and so on.
And finally, responsiveness. It’s very easy to turn on and off wind and hydro generators on demand, for example. You can look up “smart grid” if you want to learn more. Nuclear is much, much slower than Solar to turn off and on, so Solar can be though of as baseline power and wind/hydro provide conditioning.
https://smartgrid.ieee.org/bulletins/june-2019/maintaining-power-quality-in-smart-grid-the-wind-farms-contribution
Final question: If you had the choice between buying magic power banks that fully charged your phone once a day for free, no questions asked, for $50 each, and you can buy one a day, or a regular one you have to buy uranium for to fill your phone with, which costs $150 and you can buy one every 10 years, which would you choose?
I was rummaging this is probably the main reason for which they are pushed back in an excessively popular narrative in favour of nuclear: of course it is way harder to exercise capitalism when you can’t centralize power and control, with renewables instead it could probably only exist a form of cooperative enterprise with the business of managing the energy production, immagine the loath of some individuals even acknowledging some utterly leftist term such as “cooperative” even exists, let alone even works. Better.
Can I follow a particular user? I just want Blake energy in my life.
Hahah, that’s sweet of you to say, thanks - I’m not usually so self-assured, but I do have a lot of opinions. Usually they’re just opinions rather than provable scientific facts though, so I don’t go quite as hard. As to your question, genuinely, I don’t know, but you can probably do something with an RSS feed? You can also add me on Discord if you want, DM me if you want my username.
Germany is burning less coal this year in comparison to last year.