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

341–350 of 467 posts

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

#341

Post by pyrale »

Dunedan wrote: post #89
BenoitP wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany's wind and solar is only possible because neighbouring countries compensate for when there's no wind and sun; which happen a lot of the time. On top of that wind and solar production must be bought first on the EU market, effectively ruining CO2-free capital that was there beforehand (read: nuclear). So these charts that you show only demonstrate that Germany was first to jump on wind and solar production. Gr…

Do you have sources to back these claims? I'd imagine that somewhere there is always enough wind and sun in Europe.

That hypothesis, which is usually referred to as proliferation, doesn't work in practice because meteorological events are often Europe-wide.

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

#342

Post by londons_explore »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #340
londons_explore wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are those 2019 numbers or 2021 numbers?

Numbers from 1 hour ago... From the UK, and assuming UK climate for COP figures. ~True with both retail capped prices, and wholesale market prices.

There are still people in the UK installing heat pumps. Either they have a very rose tinted view of the future direction of electricity prices Vs gas, a rose tinted view of future government taxes/incentives, a rose tinted view of the environmental benefits (eg. By looking at aggregate CO2 emissions instead of marginal CO2 emissions), or they have been misled by installers/builders who make substantially more money if they install a heat pump.

Either that or I got my maths wrong. But I don't think I did.

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

#343

Post by smotah »

mikaeluman wrote: post #272

Much of Europe is following in Germanys steps I am afraid. I can only speak for Sweden. We had for the longest time the most solid energy base with hydro power in the north and nuclear in the south. Policy has since decades been anti-nuclear though but it really accelerated 2016. Basically nuclear power gets heavy tax and fee penalties while wind gets the reverse treatment. If you check https://www.svk.se/om-kraftsys…

> Much of Europe is following in Germanys steps I am afraid.

There's still hope, it is to be expected than the gas price surge and geopolitical implications of dependencies will make people realize than it's not conceivable to shut down nuclear power. That's not even taking into account the global warming considerations.

After closing a reactor to please the greens, the French government will hopefully come back in it's right mind by finishing it's EPR and building more (complete nuclear plants replacement is needed right now to anticipate the end of life of the current fleet).

The United Kingdom is expected to have a new EPR to enter service. Finland finally powered theirs two days ago. Nuclear phase out of Belgium seems unrealistic and The Netherlands is evaluating the possibility of building two plants.

France, Poland and Hungary are in favor of including nuclear power in the green taxonomy. It's a big deal because nearly all of Poland's electricity production is from coal.

Since building new plants is expensive and takes time, it should starts right now and be subsidized like new renewables, as Europe will need to replace it's old reactors in just some decades, while committing to CO2 emissions reduction.

Germany seems like a lost cause, though.

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

#344

Post by hagbard_c »

gerdesj wrote: post #330
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…

"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…

Yes, really. The price of electricity is set through a controlled market mechanism at "Nord Pool", the electricity producers exchange for the Nordic countries. Nearly all producers and sellers have pages showing these prices, here's an example:

https://www.vattenfall.se/elavtal/elpriser/timpris-pa-elbors...

and another:

https://elen.nu/dagens-spotpris/se3-stockholm/

Timpris på elbörsen (on the first site, "vattenfall") means "hourly rate on the electricity exchange". Have a look at the rates for area 3 - Södra Mellansverige (south of the middle of Sweden) and compare with the same day last year ("jämför med - Samma dag föregående år"). You'll see that the rates average some 500 öre (5 sek, about $0.55) per kWh excluding taxes, levies, surcharges and value added tax. At the same day last year the rate averaged about 20 öre, i.e. a difference of 2500%. The rates fluctuate hourly and the last few weeks they've broken all records. The increase for the last month was +245%, averaged over the whole year rates have doubled.

[edit]

Nord Pool have their own reporting on prices:

https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/Market-data1/#/nordic/table

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

#345

Post by AnthonyMouse »

michaelt wrote: post #299
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free" since you're using it for heat anyway. Heat pumps require a significant capital investment which would have to be recovered on only their efficiency improvement, since they don't otherwise generate revenue. The math is different for new construction. There heat pumps make a lot more sense because t…

> Hardware for mining cryptocurrency is self-financing in a relatively short period of time when the electricity is "free" No it isn't. I know because I looked into it. Assuming the price of bitcoin doesn't rise or fall, a cutting edge bit of dedicated bitcoin mining hardware will pay for itself in 3 years if operated continuously on free electricity, and will be effectively obsolete in 5 years, as difficulty increas…

That's because you're using Bitcoin, for which custom ASICs are a thousand times more power efficient than commodity hardware and so commodity hardware is useless, but custom ASICs are stupid expensive.

What you want is a cryptocurrency that ASICs are no better at than CPUs or GPUs, so can use an ordinary CPU or GPU that will pay for itself more quickly because most of the mining cost is electricity instead of hardware. (Hint: the hardware you want in this case has the best performance/$, not necessarily the best performance/watt.)

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

#346

Post by midjji »

tuukkah wrote: post #329
midjji wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

There is much more to it than that in this case.

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

#347

Post by cinntaile »

midjji wrote: post #271
lb0 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We must be looking at very different numbers - or what do you mean with regulation, requiring some safety standards? Nowhere nuclear got economic, required massive subsidies - and in the end has been driven by the need for the precious byproducts?

You can tell because for profit(if staterun) companies are building them across the world. France is drawing significant profits from existing nuclear, and constructing new. Nuclear has been ridiculously profitable for most countries which built them, with the sole exception of countries which started building them, then forbid nuclear. Many countries in Asia are building them because its cheaper than coal power. Mos…

I'm not that optimistic. France is putting its nuclear activities in a separate company, it's in quite a bit of debt.

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

#348

Post by nitrogen »

robertlagrant wrote: post #307
wumpus wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Renewables are like a trickle at best Doesn't Germany have a lot of wind power? Denmark sure does. Let's see, 27.2% wind in 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany And apparently there's a fair bit of North Sea area that can be used for new offshore wind.

Percentages are misleading when it comes to power sources that only work some of the time.

It would be really fascinating to see hourly/monthly percentages as a stacked bar chart.

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

#349

Post by nitrogen »

monopoledance wrote: post #300
midjji wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insulation is exactly as beneficial to gas and power heated homes. It does jack shit or worse for cooking though. France is self sufficient, but imports when prices are low in order to keep levels high in reservoirs, which further decreases prices over the year.

Or when their nuclear power plants boil their rivers...

Are there closed loop reactor designs that don't need to dump heat into a body of water?

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

#350

Post by smotah »

monopoledance wrote: post #317
Ericson2314 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longer insanity is not less insanity!

It's democracy. We were much closer to Chernobyl, than all the Americans promoting yesterday's easy future here. Some parts in Germany are suffering the fallout still, when mushrooms and wild game make the Geiger counters beep in the news. Germany is extremely population dense and nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste. Especially in rich Bavaria were all the AKWs have been build (and where they had suitable…

> nobody wants to live next to radioactive waste.

It seems irrational as sealed high profile waste doesn't leak any radiations beyond the natural ambiant radioactive noise. The problem may arise in a very long time due to water molecules progressively entering and exiting the enclosure during thousands of years.

One could live and sleep every night in a nuclear waste storage building and nothing will happen to them. Similarly, one could swim in nuclear fuel cooling pools everyday and won't have any problem either.

It's way more problematic for health to live next to a coal power plant.

Post reply on HN