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Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

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Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#211

Post by tenuousemphasis »

photochemsyn wrote: post #145
steve_taylor wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

Isn't battery storage the baseload solution for renewable power? And it doesn't have to be lithium batteries, there are cheaper alternatives if you don't need the batteries to be that small.

We do not have the capability to build enough batteries (chemical or otherwise) to power the grid entirely from renewables. Certainly not the capability to do it for less than the cost of nuclear power.

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#212

Post by tenuousemphasis »

pydry wrote: post #81
steve_taylor wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

Pumped storage isn't a generic solution. You need two huge volume reservoirs with as much vertical separation as possible. That's just not feasible in most places of the world.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#213

Post by cracker_jacks »

oska wrote: post #209

This is a highly biased article. It makes assertions that are unproven and have been highly propagandised. > Since the Bucha massacre was made public There is no proof that the people killed in Bucha were killed by departing Russian troops. The Russians are suggesting that the killings were of 'Russian friendly' Ukrainians, killed after the troops left. We won't know what actually happened until a proper inquiry has…

> The Russians are suggesting that the killings were of 'Russian friendly' Ukrainians, killed after the troops left.

Satellite imagery taken before Russian troops left shows massacre happened before withdrawal. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1511060668610457612

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#214

Post by oska »

cracker_jacks wrote: post #213
oska wrote: post #209

This is a highly biased article. It makes assertions that are unproven and have been highly propagandised. > Since the Bucha massacre was made public There is no proof that the people killed in Bucha were killed by departing Russian troops. The Russians are suggesting that the killings were of 'Russian friendly' Ukrainians, killed after the troops left. We won't know what actually happened until a proper inquiry has…

> The Russians are suggesting that the killings were of 'Russian friendly' Ukrainians, killed after the troops left. Satellite imagery taken before Russian troops left shows massacre happened before withdrawal. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1511060668610457612

This isn't the place for such a debate. There needs to be a proper legal inquiry into the massacre; not trial by media.

I wasn't making any assertions of my own as to who was responsible; I was just pointing out that responsibility has not yet been properly determined and thus should not be asserted as fact as Pueyo is doing here. And I'm not being pedantic; this is an extremely important point. Many propagandistic stories are pushed during a war. We should be careful not to buy into them.

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#215

Post by makotech221 »

freemint wrote: post #192
makotech221 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol completely wrong, the guy in charge of the energy policy in Germany is a major benefactor of GAZPROM so he made Germany entirely dependent on it.

Can you name him?

https://twitter.com/0ddette/status/1499486726259101702

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#216

Post by 99_00 »

lispm wrote: post #172
99_00 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the US imported oil from Russia. Why wouldn't they? There was no embargo. You seem to be suggesting that a direct pipeline is equivalent to buying from the global market. It isn't.

> Why wouldn't they? You were claiming that Germany is funding the Putin regime. The US does that too. It bought oil and are still buying uranium from Russia. > You seem to be suggesting that a direct pipeline is equivalent to buying from the global market. It isn't. For funding the Putin regime it is not interesting where the US was buying Russian energy. The US funded Putin, too. Trump did that, too.

And I said they were right to fund them because they are not a threat. What's your point?

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#217

Post by scythe »

diordiderot wrote: post #69
fabian2k wrote: post #47

Earlier 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?

A vapor-compression heat pump generates hot air. But many old buildings transmit heat using hot water. This only works if the water is quite a bit hotter than a heat pump usually gets, because the water heats by blackbody radiation, the radiation power is proportional to T^4, and the effective surface area of the existing radiators is calibrated to the old drive temperatures.

Heat pumps are a drop-in replacement if you have forced-air heating, but if you have hot-water radiators, it's not so easy. In theory, you could add another stage, but now you're sacrificing a lot of COP. New buildings should always be built with heat pumps (and heat exchangers) but old buildings take a lot of work to fix.

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#218

Post by [deleted] »

barry-cotter wrote: post #107
ivan_gammel wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

[deleted]

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#219

Post by scythe »

cycomanic wrote: post #142
diordiderot wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Heating the air is less efficient, by a significant margin (you need a high temperature for the same comfort level). Using US houses as an example is quite laughable, the energy consumptions of US households is much higher than German ones.

>Using US houses as an example is quite laughable, the energy consumptions of US households is much higher than German ones.

It's an extremely heterogeneous dataset, but a cursory analysis does not agree:

Germany: 136 kWh/m^2

https://bpie.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/iBROAD_CountryFac...

US: 47000 Btu/ft^2 — because we like dumb units — 148 kWh/m^2

https://constructionphysics.substack.com/p/looking-at-energy...

That's a slight win for Germany, but it's not by much. For the most part, US houses are simply larger than German ones, which is where that energy use comes from. (US temperatures are also harsher, in both directions.)

Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open

#220

Post by mikeyouse »

barney54 wrote: post #133
cycomanic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what if they died of the evacuation, the nuclear accident caused the evacuation. I find this argument mind-boggling, because people didn't die directly of radiation exposure it is somehow ok that Japan had to evacuate a significant population? If this would happen e.g. to Krümmel you'd have to evacuate the second largest city in Germany, that's 2 million people.

The point is that the people didn’t need to be evacuated.

Some of them likely would have been completely fine and completely unexposed to dangerous levels of radiation.. but not all of them.. and it was impossible to know which were which until weeks and months later when they did more thorough testing.

Many local areas were reporting over radiation of >500 millisieverts/year, which is ~150x the typical background dose. The famous XKCD Radiation chart shows a bunch of Fukushima related doses -- it was actually pretty dangerous for people close to the exclusion zone!

https://xkcd.com/radiation/

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