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Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

nytimes.com

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Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#51

Post by jhayward »

magduf wrote: post #45
DasIch wrote: post #11

Let's assume for a moment there would be no opposition to nuclear in Germany. How does nuclear energy help with climate change? Looking back to 2000, nuclear energy at peak was responsible for 32.1% of electricity production[1]. We'd need to at least double that. That would take a huge amount of money. More importantly it would take time. We can barely manage to build a single fucking airport in 1-2 decades. Building…

It seems like the answer is to simply outsource it to the French. Pay them to build and operate nuclear plants in Germany.

France is building one new reactor, at Flammanville. The plant is 11 years late in schedule, and 400% over budget.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#52

Post by melling »

plupopit wrote: post #23

The article misses to mention that Germany is actually quite active in fusion reactor research (eg. Wendelstein 7x the world's largest stellerator was just opened a few years ago). Its yet to be seen if fusion power will ever reach production level. But stating that Germany cut itself off of nuclear energy research is not exactly right.

Yes, and we will solve that nuclear fusion problem sometime over the next 50 to 150 years!

In the meantime, the decades long train wreck of climate change could easily have been slowed if we’d had simply moved off of coal earlier.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#53

Post by cma »

magduf wrote: post #39
Barrin92 wrote: post #37

I absolutely hate this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated because nuclear energy is not just falling in Germany, it's diminishing virtually across the entire world (with very few exceptions). It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unab…

Expensive compared to what? Are you comparing the full costs of coal plants to nuclear, or are you just externalizing the costs as most comparisons do? The costs of coal need to include all the effects of coal emissions into the atmosphere, which may very well be incalculable. Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe…

Nuclear costs are heavily externalized ($12 billion liability cap, rest paid by governement and there are plausible >$1trillion accident scenarios). It is as if they only have to pay insurance on a deductible.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#54

Post by looping__lui »

svara wrote: post #18
BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

Sadly, the anti-nuclear movement in Germany is very strong. Germany also has a declining Coal industry. So after Fukushima shrewd politicians moved to shutter nuclear plants and return to coal. The worst part? German coal is some of the worst in terms of sulfur and pollutants.

That's not true, coal did not replace nuclear, renewables did [0]. What's true is that coal plants could have been shut down instead of nuclear ones, which sucks. But note that anthracite coal is decreasing since ~5 years ago (dark grey bar in [0]). [0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/38... "Kohle" is coal; "Kernenergie" is nuclear; "Erneuerbare" is renewables.

Yes. And not to mention that the coal plants emit 2x as much radioactivity into the environment at comparable power generation [0].

[0] https://www.bund-nrw.de/fileadmin/nrw/dokumente/braunkohle/2...

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#55

Post by tomatotomato37 »

magduf wrote: post #39
Barrin92 wrote: post #37

I absolutely hate this narrative of the demise of nuclear energy largely being politically motivated because nuclear energy is not just falling in Germany, it's diminishing virtually across the entire world (with very few exceptions). It's true that Germany has a historical anti-nuclear and green sentiment but other countries are no different. Nuclear energy may be clean, but it is also exceedingly expensive and unab…

Expensive compared to what? Are you comparing the full costs of coal plants to nuclear, or are you just externalizing the costs as most comparisons do? The costs of coal need to include all the effects of coal emissions into the atmosphere, which may very well be incalculable. Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe…

Compared to renewables. One of the unanticipated side effects of our current focus on solar/wind is that being decentralized technologies compared to a single complex for coal/gas/hydro/nuclear/whatever mandated a focus on unit reliability since you can't have someone babysit each unit when those units are smeared across a 10 square miles or mounted on an entire suburbs' rooflines. This focus is in direct contrast to nuclear's greatest weakness that no one talks about; it's maintenance and manpower costs. Turns out using a power source that works by restructuring everything around it on the atomic level is a bit hard on the surrounding infrastructure.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#56

Post by looping__lui »

toohotatopic wrote: post #34
AlphaGeekZulu wrote: post #20

Germans do not have to decide between Nuclear Energy or Climate Catastrophe. They have to decide between the potential risks of radioactive pollution or the impairment of landscape by wind turbines and power lines. There is not much tragedy in this decision.

In France and Belgium, which are West of Germany, there are plenty of nuclear reactors. This is in a region with prevailing west winds. If Germany would want to minimize the risk of radioactive pollution, it would have to build plenty nuclear reactors at its eastern border and sell that energy to France below market value. Then, as long as France doesn't cut Germany off, the French nuclear reactors would be shut down…

And adding to that: the public DOES understand this. People in Western Germany (especially in NRW where they have to suffer from coal and are close to French and Belgium reactors) just shake heads in disbelief while having to swallow the highest electricity prices in Europe...

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#57

Post by rat9988 »

m4rtink wrote: post #15
dv_dt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think France made one of the few smart moves with nuclear in the day, but today even France is closely studying tradeoffs between reinvesting in the next gen of nuclear fission plans vs renewable. In publicised studies renewable is looking like the better option.

Still, it at least so far it worked well, they avoided releasing a lot of emissions and are now in a much better position to decide what to do next.

Actually france doesn't know how much nuclear costs. The dismantling has been order of magnitude at least understimated.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#58

Post by vkou »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #55
magduf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expensive compared to what? Are you comparing the full costs of coal plants to nuclear, or are you just externalizing the costs as most comparisons do? The costs of coal need to include all the effects of coal emissions into the atmosphere, which may very well be incalculable. Solar and wind of course are great, but has anyone figured out how to make those supply 100% of a nation's power needs, 24/7? I don't believe…

Compared to renewables. One of the unanticipated side effects of our current focus on solar/wind is that being decentralized technologies compared to a single complex for coal/gas/hydro/nuclear/whatever mandated a focus on unit reliability since you can't have someone babysit each unit when those units are smeared across a 10 square miles or mounted on an entire suburbs' rooflines. This focus is in direct contrast to…

> This focus is in direct contrast to nuclear's greatest weakness that no one talks about; it's maintenance and manpower costs.

You say weakness - and I say that more people die from falls, from installing rooftop solar panels, than do in nuclear accidents.

Power generation is inherentantly dangerous. Just because you distribute the danger around, instead of centralizing it, does not mean that you've reduced the danger.

As for the economics of nuclear, as time goes on we are finding that the actual alternative to nuclear is not renewables. It's natural gas, sourced from either fracking, or Russia.

Compared to the uptick in natural gas, renewables are a rounding error.

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#59

Post by donjoe »

Rainer Moormann's [0] recent statement concerning current nuclear costs Germany is facing in a single case:

" Here an info about #NuclearWaste. A particularly bad kind are the 900,000 HTR-balls from Hamm and Jülich. It is being considered to export them to the USA against the resistance of the ecosystem. Would cost about 1 billion €, including transportation. From the globes, 4.4 TWh, i.e. 0.15% of the German nuclear power was produced. If disposal would be generally so expensive, we would have 700 billion €, but even with LWR=factor 5 cheaper (more realistic) we would end up with 6 times what is available (24 billion €) Addendum: In the USA the graphite of the spheres is to be gasified and the CO2 is to be released into the atmosphere together with the radioactive C14. It's a military facility, they're allowed to do that. In the EU this would be excluded in the civilian sector. But it makes disposal cheaper. Here detailed information on the Jülich spherical castors radientelex.com/Stx_18_748-749... There are a total of 453 Castors with balls. The castors are however smaller than LWR castors (25 t instead of 120 t) One more addendum: The acquisition costs of the 455 castors alone were almost as high as the value of the electricity generated with the balls. And one more thing: The transport is to be carried out by an armed special ship, some dozens of trips would be necessary " [1]

(sorry, dirty twitter unroll & deepl translation)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Moormann [1] https://twitter.com/MoormannRainer/status/120112832873803776...

Edit: Typo

Re: Germany is moving beyond nuclear power, but at what cost?

#60

Post by tomatotomato37 »

vkou wrote: post #58
tomatotomato37 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to renewables. One of the unanticipated side effects of our current focus on solar/wind is that being decentralized technologies compared to a single complex for coal/gas/hydro/nuclear/whatever mandated a focus on unit reliability since you can't have someone babysit each unit when those units are smeared across a 10 square miles or mounted on an entire suburbs' rooflines. This focus is in direct contrast to…

> This focus is in direct contrast to nuclear's greatest weakness that no one talks about; it's maintenance and manpower costs. You say weakness - and I say that more people die from falls, from installing rooftop solar panels, than do in nuclear accidents. Power generation is inherentantly dangerous. Just because you distribute the danger around, instead of centralizing it, does not mean that you've reduced the dang…

Manpower salary weakness, not literal life/death weakness. Paying the population of Rhode Island to use exercise bikes connected to generators all day would also be a way to generate pollution-free safe power (in fact considering the obesity rate it would probably end up saving lives), yet there's still an obvious economic reason why such an idea would be completely stupid.
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