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

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

#371

Post by sbierwagen »

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #45
Animats wrote: post #8

Leaving Germany burning lignite (halfway between peat moss and coal) and buying natural gas from Russia. The worst of both worlds.

I don’t understand this move with Putin shutting off gas to flex. It’s going to be a very cold, very expensive winter for the Germans.

It's not (just) to flex. Russia shuts down gas pipelines basically once a year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_gas_dis... There is absolutely nothing new about this, it's just about money.

Ukraine wants to charge high transit fees, Russia wants Germany to turn on Nord Stream 2, which bypasses Ukraine. Russia also wants long-term contracts to lock in natural gas consumption-- phaseout of fossil fuel consumption is an existential threat to fossil fuel exporters.

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

#372

Post by lmm »

roenxi wrote: post #362
barney54 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6. Wholesale electricity rates have increased from 50 Euros/mwh to 250 Euros/mwh over the course of the last year. This isn't about averages. It's about meeting demand, which is especially important during the winter heating season.

7. Energy per capita has dropped by something like 20% from its peak in the 90s. Germany is a great example that these renewable policies can't sustain an industrial lifestyle. Germany is something of a cautionary tale; adopting Germany's policies will make people worse off. https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany

Arguing that energy sustainability changes have made people worse off because they've reduced per-capita energy use is blatantly begging the question. Maybe energy is being used 3x as efficiently as it was in the 90s and so people are 2.4x better off.

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

#373

Post by roenxi »

lmm wrote: post #372
roenxi wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7. Energy per capita has dropped by something like 20% from its peak in the 90s. Germany is a great example that these renewable policies can't sustain an industrial lifestyle. Germany is something of a cautionary tale; adopting Germany's policies will make people worse off. https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany

Arguing that energy sustainability changes have made people worse off because they've reduced per-capita energy use is blatantly begging the question. Maybe energy is being used 3x as efficiently as it was in the 90s and so people are 2.4x better off.

They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently. The lifestyle Germans enjoy is falling behind a hypothetical world where they implemented a cheap energy policy.

How much energy they produce is much more important when assessing how their renewable transition is going. They have barely managed to tread water by doing less per capita and matching their old supply. This is a far cry from the optimistic touting that solar/wind was a viable market competitor to fossil fuels - the evidence here is that these forms of energy are worse.

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

#374

Post by Terry_Roll »

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…

10-12 years ago the UK govt signed deals with some companies that would be building the new nuclear power plants ie EDF that they would be getting a minimum price for generation which was double what it was back then. I often think we dont have a free market but a clever fixed pricing market. UK is also windiest country in the world hence all our wind turbines. Dont know if more Electric Mountains will be built to buffer the surplus wind power as more turbines come online, but the bigger the turbine the more that is generated which is the natural progression we are seeing.

Little know fact kept out of the media when we had all the flooding over winter a few years back, one nuclear power station had to be shutdown to avoid a meltdown caused by flooding.

Electricity consumption has gone up with the increase in consumer gadgets, ie computers, tablets, mobiles, big massive flat screens, sound systems ie personal cinema setups, its only natural to see electricity demands go up.

And there is not enough of some of the rare earth materials and other metals used to make or maintain electric cars on the planet unless some miners have been keeping deposits secret, so I expect some miners share prices to go up considerably in the future.

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

#375

Post by Manuel_D »

fsh wrote: post #156
RaitoBezarius wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, according to your own links. > Uranium-235 is a finite non-renewable resource.[1][3] > As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply. The identified reserves as of 2017 recoverable at US$260/kg are 7.99 million tons (compared t…

They calculate 130 years of supply at current consumption rates . Nuclear power supplies something like 5% of the global primary energy, so scaling this to 100% would deplete the estimated reserves in a few years. Breeders would help, but have so far not been very successful. For example, the German Thorium breeder THTR-300 is considered one of the greatest technological failures in postwar history.

This supply is assuming we exclusively use terrestrially mines uranium, as well as no reprocessing. Seawater extraction can provide an effectively unlimited supply: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

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

#376

Post by richiebful1 »

gerdesj wrote: post #358
hagbard_c wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm still trying to work out the numbers. I'm quite surprised that Scandinavia is having even more problems than say the UK because you have rather a lot of useful topological features (really big hills and mountains and lakes at elevation - ie potential energy). You are also closer to the Ukraine than us for gas so that should be cheaper too. Our consumer energy market is a bit strange. We have a national grid for e…

The Nordic countries include Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland

Scandanavia includes Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. The common factor there is having closely related languages and cultures. However, speaking from experience as an American, we often use "Scandanavian" as a synonym of "Nordic".

Nord Pool covers all the Nordic countries plus a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Pool

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

#377

Post by tacocataco »

_Microft wrote: post #48
dvt wrote: post #4

This is insane to me. Nuclear is the best long-term option for ecologically-friendly energy generation. This is absolutely a bad move, and the coal industry has done a great job of demonizing nuclear power.

We experienced fallout from Chernobyl (radiation levels of wild boar meat and some mushrooms are still under surveillance today) and we were designated nuclear ground zero in case that the Soviets tried to invade Europe. What attitude towards all things nuclear do you expect to arise from that?

I'm not worried about new reactor designs failing. I'm more worried about storing and protecting waste that lasts 20,000 years.

Just seems like another opportunity to externalize costs onto future humans to me.

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

#378

Post by mhh__ »

pkdpic wrote: post #28
dvt wrote: post #4

This is insane to me. Nuclear is the best long-term option for ecologically-friendly energy generation. This is absolutely a bad move, and the coal industry has done a great job of demonizing nuclear power.

> Germany intends to take all coal-fired generation offline by 2038 Good if they actually mean it maybe? > leading to a likely increase in renewable-power assets in the long term... Yet in the short term, coal is helping to bridge the supply gap. This just seems asinine. But what do I know... Is there something impassably / chronically dangerous about nuclear power or is it just public fear that pushes us away from i…

Not only is it solvable, it's basically been solved for years.

https://youtu.be/c1QmB5bW_WQ is aimed at the lay audience.

The issue is that radiation is a silent killer, so it is extremely easy people with vested interests in (say) fossil fuels to exploit our inability to access risk. Coal hurts people every single day, but it doesn't have the same poetic weight as radiation so this is lost on the general public.

Nuclear power is expensive, however. Dealing with the waste is also an issue but firstly, forcing us to deal with the waste seriously is potentially not such a bad thing (assuming we need nuclear in the long run, which unless storage comes a very long way we presumably will), and secondly this is the kind of question where a government with a lot of political capital needs to just find some deserted land to build a long term solution.

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

#379

Post by DavidKarlas »

smotah wrote: post #313
GravitasFailure wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, interesting. I wonder if Germany is more reliant on France for providing a baseload when renewables dip while France relies on Germany for peaking and supplementing daytime loads. Thanks for the website. It'll definitely come in handy. Edit: With Germany shutting down their nukes, I'm curious if them being a net exporter remains true.

When looking at live data we should keep in mind that currently 14 reactors are stopped in France for various reasons (maintenance delayed to winter season due to COVID, safety measures of several reactors due to investigation in a deterioration of a comportent in one). In normal circumstances France should be exporting to Germany right now (it would make no economical sense for German grid operators to use the very…

Thanks for that insight, I did find it weird why they only use 2/3 of nuclear capacity...

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

#380

Post by Manuel_D »

lb0 wrote: post #253
midjji wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear is fantastic economics, its just regulated to death. The real effect of suppressing nuclear has been a slower transition to a sustainable carbon economy, and increased power prices limiting innovation and productivity. Solar and wind have benefitted, but its still a minor player, and without a revolutionary new battery tech, and gargantuan infrastructure investment, it simply cant replace a majority of curren…

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?

Nuclear is much cheaper when built at scale, with multiple copies of the same design. Serial production of nuclear plans in the 70s produced plants at a cost of about 2 billion per GW of capacity. And bear in mind that nuclear's capacity factor is over 90% as compared to 25-35% for wind and solar. And it's not an intermittent power source, eliminating the need for storage.

The reality is that we don't have the capacity to fulfill energy demand without controllable sources. You can't just say, "well it's cloudy and not very windy. Guess plumbing just isn't going to work today because we can't power the pumps." Well, you can but you'll immediately get voted out of office and replaced with someone who will build fossil fuel plants to keep the country alive.

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