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Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

thehindu.com

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Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#261
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your document's graph shows that France, and a bunch of other countries with nuclear, are subsidizing fossil fuels more than Germany. That seems to be proving the oppposite of your point. It's also interesting that France has generic "electricity" subsidies that are bigger than their "nuclear" subsidies and yet 70% of their electricity is nuclear.

The generic "electricity" subsidies in France seems similar to other countries, so my read is that they are things like transmission lines and other costs that is independent of the technology that generated the power. Could you explain the logic behind that idea that France subsidizes to fossil fuel is proof that nuclear is expensive? To me it is proof that the fossil fuel industry will extract its cut as long as th…

Someone said nuclear is expensive (compared with renewables) which is factually correct.

You said that this was wrong, because countries that deployed renewables needed to pay fossil fuels to standby and then pay them again when there's no wind or sun.

To back this up you pointed to a document about level of subsidies.

That document shows that Germany gives less subsidies to fossil fuels than other countries with nuclear plants, notably France, as a percent of GDP.

You now appear to be trying to wiggle out of this on a technicality because Germany has a bigger economy than France, though even then the final numbers are 12.2 billion vs 11.5 billion.

But, let's pretend that's what you were saying, oh look, countries with nuclear on average subsidize fossil fuels more in absolute terms.

(This is because they are bigger economies, so this is an entirely spurious correlation but even playing by your changed rules, your document doesn't support your argument).

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not replacing nuclear with gas. Nuclear has a steady output, gas will be variable output. It will run when deemed necessary.

What they going to replace that baseload with? Or do they not need that baseload any more (seems unlikely).

They'll replace it with renewables and energy storage solutions. Not instantly of course, but they'll keep building out capacity. There are also interconnections to other countries that can serve as help when needed. These developments makes pure baseload technologies less economical since you need something that can adapt to the inherent variability.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#263

I live in Germany and I wonder, what the consequences will be of shutting down both coal and nuclear in very short time. My guess is, we will pay for nuclear energy from France and coal energy from Poland when wind slows down. The new government tries to accelerate the construction of renewable energy but I think their plans will fail because of worker shortage and supply chain problems.

Germany's primary energy source is now coal, now way they can shut it down. https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec... This is so stupid, what are they thinking?

Don't freak out about a statistical variation. The trend is for wind power to increase and for coal power to decrease in Germany, so really the only interesting points in time are the first time when wind generated more than coal and the last time when coal generated more than wind. The first just happened in 2020, so freaking out about coal momentarily being on top in 2021 is pointless.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "primary" you mean they used 27% over a 6 month period, compared with 21% the 6 months a year earlier. Switching back into first after a good spell for wind had it briefly in the lead. Why does that mean they can't switch it off? The UK had 30% Coal in 2014 when they announced they would phase it out and did so slightly ahead of schedule.

27% is a misleading number because it is the average for the whole period. On some days, wind and solar can provide 100% of all electricity. But on windstill nights, it is closer to 0%. Without having a way to store a whole nation's energy needs for several days or even weeks, you still need fossil fuels (or nuclear).

> Without having a way to store a whole nation's energy needs for several days or even weeks

That requirement makes no sense, though. Do you foresee a massive volcanic eruption that there will be darkness for several weeks? Because it's sort of fact of life that the sun always rises tomorrow. Therefore asking for 100% of storage for weeks never made any sense.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#265
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's approximate the cost of that. The energy consumption of my country (the Netherlands) was 3157 PJ in 2017. This was 980 kwh per person per week. Solar batteries cost a bit more than $1000 per kwh. So at these prices this plan costs approximately $1 million per person. Solar batteries last 5-15 years. If we say that they last 20 years, then the energy storage costs are $130 per person per day per week's worth of…

Where did you get 1,000$/KWH of storage? Even at small scales (household-sized batteries, ~10~15KWH) prices are currently around 300$/KWH for lithium batteries including shipping in a 3rd world country (I know, because I live in a country where there's no 24/7 grid power and I moved my house to solar+batteries 2 years ago). I'm pretty sure at the kinds of scale you'd need for a country price per KWH would be signific…

I just googled solar battery cost and took the cheapest in the result that came up: https://www.solarchoice.net.au/blog/battery-storage-price/ It is possible that the numbers that come up there are too high.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#266
post #238
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A factor of three (which is very optimistic) doesn't change the conclusion: a week's worth of storage is not feasible with current battery technology, let alone a few weeks. How much storage would actually be required is not clear to me. It depends on a lot of factors. A week doesn't sound totally crazy to me; we certainly want a good safety margin so that society doesn't collapse in a bad winter. If we take super op…

> A factor of three (which is very optimistic) For cars, the factor of three is not "optimistic", it's simple comparison of the respective primary energies consumed by typical vehicles in their respective categories. 20 kWh to drive 100 km = 72 MJ of primary energy. 6 liters of gasoline to drive the same distance = ~220 MJ of primary energy -- roughly triple of the former number. > A week doesn't sound totally crazy…

The specific factor for cars is not relevant. The factor of 3 is wildly optimistic for general energy use. The point is that even taking the factor of 3, it's still extremely expensive.

Regarding the second paragraph: if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#267

Maybe if there is a war in Ukraine the pipelines will be destroyed, and they will be forced to turn them back on.

Gas pipeline goes thru Belarus. Only a small part of Oil pipeline crosses Ukraine.

Putin would love a good excuse to close ground pipeline tho, this would brute force Nord Stream 2.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#268

Ah well. I guess we must buy solar and wind now.

I mean they're cheaper anyways. They win.

I was being sarcastic. They may be cheaper but nothing is cheaper than a plant that does not need to be built.

Getting rid of nuclear to reduce electricity supply and then supplanting that with wind/solar is borderline evil.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#269
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

~30,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl. Can you find 20 people who have died installing solar panels? I found about 7 examples on google globally (3 in the US). The rest of the pages were the dubious statistics calculating "deaths per TWh" that both downplay cancer deaths from nuclear power and extrapolate tens of thousands of falling-off-rooftop-deaths if we generated as much electricity from our residential r…

> ~30,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl. According to what number? This WHO article says it is estimated to be about 4000 deaths: https://www.who.int/news/item/05-09-2005-chernobyl-the-true-... There were many much higher estimates made in 1986 when the disaster happened, but they turned out to be wrong. Apparently small amounts of radiation spread out over many people doesn't increase cancer rates. There were…

https://www.wiseinternational.org/nuclear-monitor/785/cherno...

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#270
post #266
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A factor of three (which is very optimistic) For cars, the factor of three is not "optimistic", it's simple comparison of the respective primary energies consumed by typical vehicles in their respective categories. 20 kWh to drive 100 km = 72 MJ of primary energy. 6 liters of gasoline to drive the same distance = ~220 MJ of primary energy -- roughly triple of the former number. > A week doesn't sound totally crazy…

The specific factor for cars is not relevant. The factor of 3 is wildly optimistic for general energy use. The point is that even taking the factor of 3, it's still extremely expensive. Regarding the second paragraph: if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...that is perhaps true, but that on…

It was an example, since obviously different uses of energy will have different improvement factors - but major uses of energy have considerable improvement factors. In case of heating, for example, the factor is theoretically infinite because it's possible to build net-zero-energy buildings. And specifically in case of Germany, a very large portion of natural gas consumption goes into heating, so this is quite relevant here.

> if you point is that it would be cheaper to duplicate a significant portion of our energy generation, one based on renewables and one based on fossil fuels for safety...

I didn't say a word about basing something on fossil fuels.

> that is perhaps true, but that only proves the original point, so I'm a bit confused why you phrase your replies in an antagonistic tone of voice when we seem to agree

I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to was proposing storing a WEEK's worth of PRIMARY energy in TODAY'S amounts in BATTERIES. Nobody would seriously consider such a contrived scenario; it would be completely pointless. So I can't possibly agree with those numbers.

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