>Since the Bucha massacre was made public, Germany has financed the Russian government by paying nearly $1.5B for its gas1. What's the number for since the war began? It's higher right? That's a lot of coal per year... 20 years to get 20% wind and solar. Tesla just opened their factory. VW has a nice selection of EVs; Taycan is beautiful! Don't fathom how they could fix their situation. Too bad they didn't have someo…
Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
91–100 of 480 posts
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're repeating some of the excuses the article addresses. - The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert. - They quantify the additional risk of meltdown due to delaying new safety regulations. It's negligible compared to operating plants according to the new regulations. - Their proposal would increase Germany's stockpile of nuclear waste by 3%, which is surely within e…
Everything in life is a tradeoff. To me, the risks of keeping the nuclear plants in Germany are much lower than the risks of continuing to fund Russia.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Total war is less common than you might think. Ukraine for example isn’t a giant nuclear crater, yet they had a nuclear power plant being shelled. Meanwhile Ukraine isn’t shelling Russian civilians. So it’s quite possible for war between nuclear powers to avoid that level of escalation.
But Ukraine isn't a nuclear power. And there are no circumstances where you're better off fighting an adversary that supplies all of your energy than having your own nuclear reactors.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert. That's not how it works. Just going to grad school (and it appears this is just for a Master's) doesn't imply you're suddenly an expert on an entire discipline . Even full professors don't generally claim to be experts in their entire fields; they become experts in their niches sub-fields/areas of research. You'd need to know…
I think this is moving the goalposts. According to you it's not enough to have the qualifications, you need specific ones in specific sub areas. What's to stop you dismissing him by dividing it up even more if it turns out he's actually studied the right area? To me it sounds a bit like when anti vaxxers dismiss doctors who aren't epidemiologists, or when people dismiss Krugman because he's a trade economist and not…
I would think my reasonableness would stop me in that case, but there's not much I can offer you when you've already assumed otherwise.
And to be extremely clear: I was merely responding to the metric/reasoning used in the parent comment, not making any claims about the author's qualifications in particular. It would've applied to anybody, whether Einstein or just a random dude. Even for Einstein, you don't say "I know Einstein was an expert because he went to grad school", you say (for example) "I know Einstein was an expert in mechanics because he came up with relativity, an expert in electromagnetism because he explained the photoelectric effect, etc." That was my point, is all.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#95The arguments against turning back on the nuclear reactors in Germany sound so fundamentally unserious that you are forced to choose between "these people are paid by Russians" and "these people have a phobia about nuclear energy and won't consider any rational arguments". I'm not even talking of the moral position of "we'd better sponsor a genocidal maniac to the tune of a billion euros per week than temporary suffe…
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The author says they studied nuclear in grad school, and are probably therefore an expert. That's not how it works. Just going to grad school (and it appears this is just for a Master's) doesn't imply you're suddenly an expert on an entire discipline . Even full professors don't generally claim to be experts in their entire fields; they become experts in their niches sub-fields/areas of research. You'd need to know…
I think this is moving the goalposts. According to you it's not enough to have the qualifications, you need specific ones in specific sub areas. What's to stop you dismissing him by dividing it up even more if it turns out he's actually studied the right area? To me it sounds a bit like when anti vaxxers dismiss doctors who aren't epidemiologists, or when people dismiss Krugman because he's a trade economist and not…
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#97Being anti-nuclear is deeply engrained in the DNA of Germany's green party. Even more so than climate change. In fact, when the anti-nuclear movement started, climate change wasn't even a topic. In other words, the only thing that needs to happen is the German green party to admit a mistake in fighting nuclear power harder than fossile fuels...
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
The sentence about simply replacing gas with heat pumps is almost delusional. You can't just switch out the main heating system for an entire country. Heat pumps require quite a lot of conditions that simply are not met by many older buildings. And even if that weren't an issue, there is still the sheer scale of the problem.
> require quite a lot of conditions that simply are not met by many older buildings. Such as?
If Germany wanted to switch everyone over to a different kind of lightbulb they'd need to ensure the production capacity to make the new bulb exists and set up logistics to actually distribute it. You'd have a fair amount of non-compliance due to paranoia and other factors but I think you could probably get it done with a year or two of warning... Once you hand the household the lightbulbs they just go through and replace them all and dispose of the old bulbs...
To change out a heating system you need to remove large appliances, install other large appliances, fiddle around with gas lines and the breaker panel (probably you'd need to replace a fair number of breaker panels in older houses to handle the higher throughput), deal with the wiring which might be unsafe for the power you'll be sending over them... then you'd need to actually install the radiators, that involves tearing up floors to do it right (floor radiation can be extremely efficient and generally creates a higher apparent heat than traditional radiators placed next to windows for fire hazard reasons), or else popping in some other more module style of radiator. Those radiators might use direct electric generation or you might opt for additional boiler capacity (much more sane for efficient stand-radiators) which comes with piping requirements along with a lot more wiring work.
All of that is in addition to all the problems I mentioned around lightbulbs - you're still going to need to actually produce and distribute all the material needed to execute this change.
If you, as a person, want to swap out the heating in your house it'll be a weeks (maybe if you're lucky) or months long renovation - imagine trying to do that on the scale of a country, the only way it'd be even plausible is if you essentially drafted large portions of the population and trained them up on trades - that might not be a terrible economic investment, but it certainly isn't going to happen fast.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not just the German greens. Australia’s greens are staunchly anti-nuclear despite it being the only viable solution to the baseload problem, which renewables haven’t yet solved.
...other than pumped storage, demand shaping and more grid interconnects.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> require quite a lot of conditions that simply are not met by many older buildings. Such as?
The temperature you achieve is lower than for older gas heating equipment, so your radiators are likely not dimensioned correctly if you switch. You really want floor heating for heat pumps, and very well insulated walls. The moment the heat pumps can't provide enough heating you have to heat with electricity, and that is incredibly expensive especially in Germany.