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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

#301

Post by ClumsyPilot »

lispm wrote: post #163
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CO2 anyone? Case closed. Unlike nuclear waste that sits in on one place and doesn't move, CO is destroying ecosystems across the world

Nuclear waste does not sit in one place and it does move. We are talking about longer time scales, from decades up. With nuclear power as the main cure against CO2 production we would need to build thousands of nuclear power plants world wide. Let's say Germany would need a hundred (remember we need to replace gas for heating and oil for traffic). 80 million people. World population is roughly 100 times of that. Good…

Its vitrified in glass, and then placed into a copper barrel amd welded shut. Where and how does that move in 200 years?

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

#302

Post by nullc »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #291
jandrewrogers wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without disagreeing per se, some of the reasoning is dubious. Studying something in grad school likely makes you familiar, not an expert. I would be skeptical of anyone without at least a decade of industry experience. No one becomes an expert by going to grad school; you have to build real things under real constraints. I went through a selective hard sciences program (coincidentally including nuclear chemistry) and…

Do you think the politicians who made the decision were any more qualified?

Not to argue the case, but they surely had ample opportunity to be briefed by persons who were very qualified-- and if they failed to get those briefings they were failing in their duty.

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

#303

Post by akvadrako »

bozhark wrote: post #103
MauranKilom wrote: post #102

So the entire article, and also the discussion here skips over a very simple point: Nuclear power plants provide baseline loads because they can't be turned on and off at a whim, while gas power plants can scale up and down quickly to handle daily load peaks. Looking at yearly consumption graphs completely ignores the reality of the grid. Where do you get electricity from for the peaks in the morning and the evening,…

That’s not at all correct. You’re stating nuclear cannot handle load distributions. Why.

It's not that Nuclear can't handle variable loads, it's that once you have the plant running the fuel cost is negligible. So unless the price of electricity goes negative it doesn't make much sense to reduce the output.

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

#304

Post by ivan_gammel »

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?

The number of deaths from a nuclear incident will be significant in Germany in any case, either as a result of evacuation or from radiation. The economic damage overall will be much higher than in any incident of the past, due to environmental impact, destroyed or de-valued property, disrupted businesses etc. Half of German GDP will be the lowest estimate.

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

#305

Post by nullc »

Archelaos wrote: post #187
ivan_gammel wrote: post #33

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…

One should also not forget that Germany's nuclear industry is identical with its fossil-energy industry: RWE, Vattenfall, E.ON/PreussenElectra, EnBW. (STEAG is the only major fossil-energy company that was not involved in nuclear energy.) The situation Germany finds itself in today is the direct result of these companies lobbying the various Merkel governments between 2005 and 2021. Instead of relying heavily on rene…

> Instead of relying heavily on renewables, too much emphasis was placed on coal and gas when nuclear power was phased out

What power source do you recommend they use to level off supply when solar/wind aren't producing?

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

#306

Post by akimball »

0xy wrote: post #296
photochemsyn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah yes, batteries made from non-renewable resources mined by literal child slaves is the solution to renewables' glaring baseload problems. The only problem is, that makes them non-renewable. Renewables + gas = not renewable. Renewables + batteries = not renewable (plus there's the whole child slavery thing that ideologues ignore)

You're referring to cobalt, presumably, but lithium-ion is being replaced - now - by lithium-phosphate in cars, and base loads will probably use sodium or iron batteries, and none of these use cobalt.

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

#307

Post by akvadrako »

danamit wrote: post #210
zxspectrum1982 wrote: post #40

The best moment to start building a nuclear plant was 10 years ago. The next best moment is today.

There isn't enough nuclear fuel in the world, nuclear energy is at best experimental sandbox hobbyist sciency stuff. It will not scale in the world, the moment we start all building them it will be hella expensive.

There is enough Uranium in the Earth's crust to power the whole planet for about 92 million years.

  - 65e15 kg = Uranium in Earth's crust
  - 709000 MJ/kg = energy density of natural U²
  - 500e12 MJ = 500 million TJ annual global energy usage
  - 92e6 = 65e15 × 709e3 / 500e12
It's actually very common and it's only a small cost component anyway. Including all processing, it accounts for less than one cent per kWh.

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

#308

Post by nullc »

Tomte wrote: post #202
seoaeu wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some buildings, installing a heat pump is "only" a matter of swapping out one large appliance with another (since you're able to reuse the ducts, etc.) but that's still widely expensive and logistically complicated to do on scale of a country.

In America. Heating/cooling ducts and "outdoor units" that could be swapped are very rare in Germany. We use mostly radiators, and in newer buildings in-floor heating. Both are based on warm water pipes.

You can use heat pumps to heat water... in fact, it's a very good form of energy storage for off-grid homes in cold climates: You put in a 100 gallon water tank, use a heat pump water heater to bring it up to 150deg F when the sun is shining. You use fail safe mixing valves to provide hot water for the taps/showers (which greatly increases the effective size of the hot tank), and the hot water can be used more directly for heating.

Retrofits can be hard though, since the water loop may be designed for a rather high temp... though there are some heatpumps that get to rather high temps.

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

#309

Post by akimball »

tenuousemphasis wrote: post #211
photochemsyn wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is true that present battery production rates are too low, but the solution to that is simply to increase demand.

The lithium constraint will be solved by using sodium or iron batteries, depending on application.

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

#310

Post by nullc »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #263
Beldin wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stopping the import of Russian gas now instead of allowing more time does absolutely nothing for Ukraine except for a little bit of moral support, while tanking the German economy. Russia is already in a downward spiral. You truly believe that stopping to transfer multiple millions a day to Russia will not have any effect in how it spends money? Even though, in your words, they're in a downwards spiral? Russia is f…

You are lying. I did not say "it will not have any effect on Russia's spending". Clearly, it would have. But not in the military, certainly not in the short term. Russia can be completely bankrupt and still keep destroying all of Ukraine for years. A year to phase out all Russian imports? With most of it gone a lot sooner? Not that big a deal.

Can you rephrase your post to assume good faith on the part of the person you're responding to?
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