Germany is closing half of its reactors before the end of the year • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by patd » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 3:58 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #342

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lookin…

Can you expand on the aggregate CO2 vs marginal CO2 part ?

I’m looking into installing a ground heat pump in a new house (coupled with solar panels) mostly for environmental reasons and all the critics I’ve read so far were about the costs.

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

#382

Post by sgift » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 4:31 AM UTC

lambdasquirrel wrote: post #236

BenoitP wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. There is very little energy storage 2. Sun and wind only produce a fraction of the time (40% [1] and 25% [2] respectively, and 7.5% (= 8.94/(63.2+56)) of installed capacity this very second [3]) 3. Production capacity without sun and wind Germany's mix only work because of neighbouring countries. And their humongous amounts of still existing coal and gas. [1] https://assets.greentechmedia.com/assets/content/cache/…

Sure but carbon is carbon. If they are able to get that much more of their overall power output from renewable, that's carbon not going into the air. The problem with the current generation of nuclear is that it's expensive to build, and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old. If it's possible to get the same emissions reduction by building out lots and lots of renewable, instead of spending that money on nuclear…

> and a lot of the older reactors are, well, old.

People say this as if reactors get build once and then stay the same way. These reactors get upgraded all the time. Here's an example: Isar 1 was one of the oldest reactors in Germany. When a German reactor gets new fuel rods it has to be certified again according to current regulations. Isar 1 needed new fuel rods in 2011, so it got upgraded and certified again. After that new fuel rods were introduced into the reactor. A few month later as consequence of the Fukushima disaster it got "shut down"[1], because it was now "not safe". Which is obviously bullshit, cause the rules on reactor safety for German nuclear reactor didn't change due to Fukushima, opinions did and politicians needed to show that they do something.

[1] It didn't really get shut down in 2011. It got removed from the power grid. So, Isar 1 continued to produce power, which was then promptly discharged into the environment as heat. Only after the fuel rods were burned down it really got shut down.

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

#383

Post by lmm » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 4:33 AM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #373

lmm wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppl…

> They'd still have a better lifestyle if they used the same amount of energy and used it more efficiently.

Only if you're assuming some kind of linear relationship between energy consumption and happiness, which seems extremely dubious.

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

#384

Post by sgift » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 4:41 AM UTC

this_user wrote: post #61

uniqueuid wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point. People don't easily forget when they had to avoid fresh fruit, vegetables and meat for a year because it was radioactive.

And parents replacing the sand in their children's sandpits. There are parts of southern Germany where you are not supposed to collect mushrooms or hunt and eat game, because there is still enough residual nuclear contamination to be harmful to humans. Proponents of nuclear energy like to pretend that it is almost completely safe. But if we look beyond the, admittedly relatively low, confirmed number of immediate cas…

I often wonder how different perception would be if people ran around with the equivalent of a Geiger counter for air pollution. It's easy to argue that parts of Germany are still contaminated by nuclear radiation, but they are by air pollution too, which is also incredibly dangerous. But no one would think about not letting their children play outside because of it.

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

#385

Post by _1tan » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #345

michaelt wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hardwa…

Which cryptocurrency would work for example? Monero?

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

#386

Post by wumpus » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 5:26 AM UTC

midjji wrote: post #277

wumpus wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your number include electric heat pumps? Germany is warm enough for very modern heat pumps to do well.

Heat pumps change this a bit, doubling the efficiency (assuming its similar to Sweden), but it varies. So in the ideal case, its roughly the same, in practice slightly less, and with costs it gets complicated and dominated by subsidies and existing infrastructure. Heat pumps require nearby reservoirs however, land essentially, which is available in suburbs, but can be quite a challenge in dense cities. But the real p…

How is it similar to Sweden, when Sweden is colder?

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

#387

Post by wumpus » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 5:27 AM UTC

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.

That wasn't theoretical installed base, it was actual power produced.

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

#388

Post by dekervin » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 5:27 AM UTC

drdmi wrote: post #267

Why are so many here pro-nuclear? How do you solve the problems that come with increasing use of nuclear reactors? 1. handling nuclear waste 2. knowledge transfer of breeding technology which is also used for creating plutonium for atom bombs

It's so lopsided you'd think every hacker news reader moonlight as an engineer at a nuclear plant. I count 5 "insane" on that page already. German policies are insane, California is insane,... you get the drift.

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

#389

Post by wumpus » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 5:30 AM UTC

spywaregorilla wrote: post #308

chris_va wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This would be very difficult for the grid. Switching to electric heating is a big hurdle.

Electric heating? Do you mean resistive heating, or heat pumps? It's been difficult in this discussion to figure out what people are saying.

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

#390

Post by wumpus » Thu, Dec 23, 2021, 5:33 AM UTC

londons_explore wrote: post #328

chris_va wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"current electricity and gas prices"? Those vary.

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

Heat pumps are used way farther north in the US since I was a kid, including (now) in places that don't need cooling.