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To mix it with renewables, you need at least some reasonably fast capacity. How much of the gas generation capacity is baseload capacity that could be replaced with nuclear?
a) Because it's no longer technically feasible not to shut these plants down. b) Because it's not politically tenable. c) Because nuclear energy has long since been a minor part of electricity generation, and it wouldn't make much of a difference now. d) Because it has nothing to do with imports of Russian gas and oil, which is overwhelmingly used for heating, fuel, and industrial purposes. Gas (not just from Russia)…
Cameco could easily restart Rabbit Lake and McArthur River. Supply is no issue. Claiming that mining uranium is an "ecological disaster" is disingenuous. It's not excessively dangerous relative to other mining operations.
I am also quite doubtful about someone asserting we could just use nuclear powerplants for substituting gas peakers, that's not how things work.
[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Atomkraft-Befuerworter-fuer-BASE-P...
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> require quite a lot of conditions that simply are not met by many older buildings. Such as?
The technology is improving by leaps and bounds: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/07/new-heat... My parents in France ditched their 40 year old gas furnace for a heat pump, more than 50% subsidized by the French government, and they couldn’t be happier.
What I read in this article is that German government did a thorough analysis, but the author dismisses the conclusions of it because the tolerated risk level there is too low and because it’s done by a minister from the Greens party. If this was written by an expert, that could make some sense, but it is not. Nuclear plant is not a startup, where you can just skip the QA part to release faster or put a not working c…
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…
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I think the biggest ask the article is making in an unreasonable way is to somehow find millions of contractors who can actually go home by home and refit the heating systems in a timescale that'd actually be relevant for the war in ukraine. 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 actua…
This was a great answer and well thought out! Thanks for taking the time. My only rebuttal is heat pumps can heat the air directly. No need for a radiator or plumbing.
You can't even do widow AC style units.
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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.
Modern heat pumps work well below freezing, in Chicago 2021 there were 4 days that gas heating would be more efficient. Maybe don't use a radiator? American heat pumps hear air directly.
And how do you do this in a building never designed for this king of system?
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> 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. First of all, that estimate was not made by an expert, as other commenters pointed out. Second, the additional risk is created not because of new safety standards, but also from all other factors where deviation from standard procedures could accelerate…
> This risk is hard to quantify, it can materialize in unexpected ways (just like nobody expected Chernobyl or Fukushima) and it will cost such rich and densely populated country as Germany trillions. You know everyone who died from Fukushima died from the evacuation not radiation, right? You know more people are killed in Germany every year from coal pollution than have died as a result of Chernobyl in total?
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The author is misrepresenting or misunderstanding the nuclear waste argument in the report. The report says that you have to consider the costs of storing the waste if you want to run the reactors longer than planned, that's it. And we have not solved the storage at all in Germany, there is no plan yet on where to put long-term storage for nuclear waste. This is certainly a solvable problem, but the fact that it has…
There's nothing really to solve. Dry-cask storage can be used long term. The waste is secure, easily monitored, and if at some point in the future reprocessing makes economic sense that can be done too.
Gas and nuclear have one very important difference: Gas is among the technologies that allow adjusting generation the fastest, nuclear is the slowest. To mix it with renewables, you need at least some reasonably fast capacity. How much of the gas generation capacity is baseload capacity that could be replaced with nuclear?