Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#271

Post by 988747 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:36 PM UTC

wildmanxx wrote: post #142

_dain_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

paying way more for electricity is not a good thing, sorry.

Funny, I had this exact discussion with a colleague at work the other day. She claimed this is nonsense and won't change anybody's mind. Then she mentioned that she just had bought a new car. I asked what kind, it's a hybrid. I asked why? Well, because her old car was using so much fuel, and with recent price hikes, that became too expensive, so she just bought one that was significantly more fuel efficient. The _exa…

Hybrids are not the same as electric. They get their fuel savings from the fact that they can convert kinetic energy from braking back to electricity. Plus the fact that electric engines are more efficient way to pull off (which is where the ICE wastes most fuel). None of those things require an external electricity source.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#272

Post by 988747 » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:44 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #180

dane-pgp wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The data shows that. Many people are saying this. > An increased reliance on renewables means a large increase in reliance on LNG. What matters is whether increased reliance on renewables slows down the decarbonisation effort. If you have data which shows that, I'd be interested to see it. In return, let me offer a study from last year which found: "in countries with a high GDP per capita, nuclear electricity produ…

Solar and wind mean you need batteries (can’t do off-peak without it). This means you still need peaker plants. Even if you accelerated battery technology drastically (which I’d say is already at max R&D speed mostly), you’re looking at some fundamental challenges getting the precious materials (total volume/cost and also energy required to do the mining). Finally, my understanding is that solar and wind can’t actual…

> Solar and wind mean you need batteries (can’t do off-peak without it)

We do not have enough batteries in the world, and producing enough of them would take decades, and cost us trillions of dollars. Nuclear power plants are better and cheaper solution.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#273

Post by folkrav » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 4:54 PM UTC

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #149

bufferoverflow wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Looks like pandering to Greens/anti-nuclear people, but honestly, I don't know. To me, it appears borderline insane, but there's probably something that I am missing.

Non German here, but pandering to greens by switching to coal sounds like pure insanity. Not that I'm surprised by much these days...

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#274

Post by sam_lowry_ » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 5:40 PM UTC

deeviant wrote: post #250

luckylion wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't that Fukushima is great and hooray, the point is that it still killed fewer people than coal power plants do every year in pretty much every country. And solar won't be replacing the nuclear plants that are being shut down. Coal and gas will.

> And solar won't be replacing the nuclear plants that are being shut down. Coal and gas will. I already stated that I don't support the shutting down of existing nuclear plants. But it hardly matters, the plants shutting down a very small part of the global grid, what matters is the future of the grid. Solar and wind with storage should be the future of the grid.

what storage? there is no storage.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#275

Post by sam_lowry_ » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 5:49 PM UTC

rasz wrote: post #267

Ericson2314 wrote: post #2

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.

Belarus is run by a mad man and his killer elite. There is no worse country to pass gas through.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#276

Post by sam_lowry_ » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #136

protastus wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many people died from Chernobyl? About 50, despite over 100,000 people working at the site on cleanup. The adjacent reactors continued to run and provide power for about a decade after the incident. I am surprised you're quoting official Soviet numbers. Numbers that weren't updated since the early days of the accident. > How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero. At what cost?

Besides the spike in thyroid cancers, from the Baltics to Poland, Romania and Ukraine on down. https://news.un.org/en/story/2018/04/1008292

This is 4000 deaths spread statistically over I do not remember how many tens of years.

Check for yourself: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub913e_web.p...

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#277

Post by sam_lowry_ » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 7:12 PM UTC

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #235

pphysch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devastation is a strong word. The restricted area around Chernobyl is incredibly wild and lush right now. It's just humans that don't want to live there for credible health concerns. Excessive resource extraction causes devastation.

The area for hundreds of kilometers radius around Chernobyl, including Kiev, is still contaminated, with effects on people's health still being felt. It is common to downplay the effects of the accident, but it is huge. (I'm originally from that area.)

No post body was provided.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#278

Post by sam_lowry_ » Wed, Jan 05, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #235

pphysch wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devastation is a strong word. The restricted area around Chernobyl is incredibly wild and lush right now. It's just humans that don't want to live there for credible health concerns. Excessive resource extraction causes devastation.

The area for hundreds of kilometers radius around Chernobyl, including Kiev, is still contaminated, with effects on people's health still being felt. It is common to downplay the effects of the accident, but it is huge. (I'm originally from that area.)

I am surprised people do not know coal plants are a major source of radiation in Eastern Europe.

Re: Germany shuts down half of its remaining nuclear plants

#279

Post by jules » Sun, Jan 09, 2022, 8:00 AM UTC

jhgb wrote: post #270

jules wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 relev…

I find it fascinating that you call me nonsensical for making the very reasonable assumption that energy consumption will stay the same for a back-of-the envelope calculation, and here you are talking about infinite improvement factors.

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

You said: "Yes, but that doesn't imply you need the capacity to run the country 100% on batteries for a week. That's just not something anyone would ever do. For example, a gas turbine with a low duty cycle would definitely be cheaper than a battery after a certain period of time. So why would you use a battery for that?"

> I don't see how we "seem to agree". The comment I initially responded to

Note that I responded to that comment with a calculation showing that that plan is economically infeasible. The scenario is not all all contrived; what that person proposed we need is reasonable, and it would in fact be quite dangerous and insufficient to have only one week's worth. Years in which there is more than a week without wind and hardly any sun (due to winter) occur approximately every 10 years in Germany. Thus calling a week's worth of storage contrived is just wrong. If anything, it's contrived in the direction of not being enough.