Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

bnnbloomberg.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 467 posts

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#321

Post by hagbard_c »

raffraffraff wrote: post #311
hagbard_c wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Sweden natural gas is hardly used yet electricity prices have gone up astronomically compared to last year - daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time. Heating in Sweden is a combination of electric (resistive elements and heat pumps), wood in some form (firewood, pellets, wood chips), some oil and process heat from industry where available. The Swedish equivalent of t…

It's amazing. How many so-called zero emissions cars will be running on lignite next year? Oh, I give up.

Don't. Keep on pointing out this lie, not so much to smear electric vehicles - given good battery technology these are a good idea - but to make clear that the powertrain is as clean as its dirtiest link. Whether this is a browncoal-fired powerplant, a polluting Cobalt mine employing child labour or fields full of not recyclable wind turbine blades, these things need to be taken out of the chain for the technology to deserve the "green" label. Given that an increase in CO₂ will lead to an increase in biomass [1,2] you may as well apply a "green" label to fossile fuels, it would be just as disingenuous.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenvs.2015.0004...

[2] https://gml.noaa.gov/icdc7/proceedings/abstracts/bhattHI49.p...

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#322

Post by alkonaut »

monopoledance wrote: post #312
alkonaut wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So germans are still buying (some) Russian gas for heat, while shutting down nuclear plants? That just seems wrong. > biomass" often gets hidden in the "clean energy" part, but that just means burning something other than oil/coal/gas. That's usually CO2 neutral if it's waste/wood pellets etc. Whether it's "clean" or "sustainable" is a hot topic, but in terms of climate it's a lot better than fossil fuel.

You make an argument that only works in theory. In reality you cannot switch heating modalities like underwear for whatever seems reasonable at the moment. Most houses are build with gas and oil heating systems. In some places like Berlin the gas infrastructure is very old and established. Even streetlights run on gas in some places and houses have generators in the basement to combine heat and electricity supply.

But this argument has been made for years. For decades. We are talking about banning the sales of combustion engine vehicles within 10 years. Surely in 10, 20 or 30 years one should be able to see pretty significant progress in the conversion of building heating systems?

I’m assuming old multi story houses with gas heating typically use a water system (radiators) and only a single basement furnace? In that situation, switching the boiler to anything else or even better just using central heating should be a reasonably sized investment.

It’s not like German cities are unique in how they are built and heated. Lots of other cities have done this conversion in the latest decades.

Gas infrastructure was old and established in all major European cities. Now it’s electrical stoves and central heating in many places.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#323

Post by patall »

com2kid wrote: post #256
midjji wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power is far to abstract and far to cheap for people to make even the slightest adjustment to their habits. After all, lets say you knew that making your morning coffe between 07-08 cost 10 cents more than doing so an hour earlier or later, would you get up earlier, or go to work latter? And in 1 cent is more realistic.

Sure, but again the example was washing clothes, and clothes dryers use a LOT of energy. Holy crap, doing the math a US style dryer would cost ~1.50 in electricity in Germany to dry one load of clothing. Sources: https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Germany/electricity_price... https://www.thespruce.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-an-el... So, like, you know, yeah. My dryer has a delay start function on it, if late ni…

Most people in Germany do not have an electric dryer.

Also, electricity prices are not the same everywhere. My parents for example pay only 20 ct/kwh (I have no idea how they got that contract, especially since they moved only last year. They have low overall usage though (2,000 kWh/a, with fixed cost being like 30% of the total bill)

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#324

Post by dane-pgp »

clavicat wrote: post #280
zibzab wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germans have always been anti-nuclear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...

The history of twentieth century tells us that Germans have questionable judgement and bad opinions.

If you think that Germans are capable of making multiple terrible political decisions in the space of a century, then why do you trust them to operate and regulate nuclear reactors and safely store their waste for thousands of years?

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#326

Post by pezzana »

This may sound like a big deal, but Germany only currently consumes about 12% of its electricity from nuclear power, according to:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...

Solar and wind have increased, while hydrocarbons are neutral to declining.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#327

Post by patall »

tomp wrote: post #201
barney54 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Currently (20:56 UTC) there is no sun shining in Europe. As for wind, in the UK (it's the country where I know where to find the real-time data easily), wind is only producing about 1/3 of its capacity--about 7GW of 24GW capacity. https://www.energydashboard.co.uk/live Overall renewables are generating about 1/4 of total generation.

How much of that wind power is actually produced within the UK vs. on in the surrounding sea? Point being, most EU countries don't have as much sea to use for wind, so have much lower wind power generation potential.

The UK has 275 inhabitants per square kilometer, the EU has 102 inhabitants per square kilometer.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#328

Post by londons_explore »

chris_va wrote: post #274
garmaine wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heating is largely natural gas based, so it's not substitutive. I don't think Germany should be shutting down its nuclear reactors, but that has nothing to do with Russian gas. (Unless perhaps they started making synthetic methane using the heat of a nuclear reactor, which is not a terrible idea but not something they are currently doing AFAIK.)

To be fair, residential/commercial heating could be entirely electric, and heat pumps have additional benefits over natural gas heating (like being reversible in the summer). Presumably people would switch if the cost of electricity was low enough for it to be more economical. Decisions that result in the price of electricity staying high provide political leverage to gas producers. Though, eyeballing the numbers, it…

In northern countries where the primary need is heating (and there is very little need for cooling), heat pumps at current electricity and gas prices are 2x more expensive per kWh of heat put into the property. They are also about 3x more expensive to install.

They only make sense in places that need cooling too, or when electricity gets cheaper.

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#329

Post by tuukkah »

midjji wrote: post #314
tuukkah wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source for Finland moving the goalposts during the construction?

The wiki article gives a decent overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#... Though you will need to follow the references, look for STUK approving some methodology, then claiming its results are insufficient.

Umm, it's not the safety regulator's task to promise the results will be sufficient if you use a specific methodology: "Scrum methodology is fine, so the resulting software quality will be fine too."

Re: Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year

#330

Post by gerdesj »

hagbard_c wrote: post #275
garmaine wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heating is largely natural gas based, so it's not substitutive. I don't think Germany should be shutting down its nuclear reactors, but that has nothing to do with Russian gas. (Unless perhaps they started making synthetic methane using the heat of a nuclear reactor, which is not a terrible idea but not something they are currently doing AFAIK.)

In Sweden natural gas is hardly used yet electricity prices have gone up astronomically compared to last year - daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time. Heating in Sweden is a combination of electric (resistive elements and heat pumps), wood in some form (firewood, pellets, wood chips), some oil and process heat from industry where available. The Swedish equivalent of t…

"daily rates are now around 10 to 20 times what they were last year around the same time"

Really? 10 to 20x? That's 1,000 to 2,000% Here in the UK we've had suppliers collapse due to some "issues" involving not buying with fixed prices and end users like you and me get bills that are about 150% last year but not 1,000%.

We have (had) quite a lot of innovative suppliers that offered "green" tariffs that were backed by variable suppliers. Unfortunately the shit hit the fan and the price charged back in the day wasn't enough to cover the current rate plus enough profit to cover admin.

Post reply on HN