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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

#331

Post by captainmuon »

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.

The solution to the baseload problem is flexible demand. If it is cloudy and non windy, don't smelter aluminum, to put it bluntly. It is pretty easy, but we have to adjust our expectation of having 100% power at all times, and of the private sector being able to exploit it to 100%.

Solar, wind, water, geothermal, biogas and battery storage together are more then enough to "keep the lights on" at all times. And in peaks we can already produce more renewable energy than we can use. It is "just" a matter of investing into storage and flexible consumption.

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

#332

Post by vishnugupta »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #233
hedora wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

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…

> I would put more value in the opinions of people that have built or worked on real systems.

+100. It took me a while to internalise Nassim Taleb's point of skin in the game. Now that I exactly know what he means I've learned to more or less disregard opinions of non-practitioners.

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

#333

Post by captainmuon »

kleene_op wrote: post #241
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.

I keep hearing this battery argument but I have yet to see a single country backup its whole network with those.

You can't back up a whole country with batteries, or use it to flatten out the demand and supply peaks. Maybe with other storage, but I don't think it will work with batteries.

You would use batteries for example in a local small scale power plant, powering a small city district or a hospital or similar.

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

#334

Post by dzikimarian »

nl wrote: post #292
dzikimarian wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of issues? No. I assume you mean nazis, but while it's hard to find words to describe their crimes, they had pretty robust approach to engineering. On the east side from the other hand ideology always beat logic. Also, if we're going to assume, that everything we build will be foundation for the next Hitler, then there's hardly point in doing anything.

The point is that corrupt political outcomes occur anywhere. And Nazi Germany had exactly the same issues you identified in Soviet Union: a reluctance to tell authority bad news.

Of course it was present, like in any authoritarian system.

But you can see that the scale of fuckups for these two is nowhere near of each other. Modern evidence is Ukrainian war, which Russians believed, can win in 48 hours.

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

#335

Post by 12baad4db82 »

jpfr wrote: post #313
satellite2 wrote: post #284

The author first show that gas is mostly used for heating and then claim it can be substituted by turning the centrals back on this year. He skips over the fact that everyone would have to replace their heating infrastructure. He also skips over the fact that heating with electricity is much more expensive than with fossil fuels. Even at a war inflated price.

No. With heat pumps electricity is way cheaper for heating. Only on nights with temperatures below -5 Celsius gas is cheaper. The problem is that most vendors are sold out.

I think is true for single detached housing, is it also true for larger apartment complexes? I bring this up because in Germany I believe most of the population does not live in detached housing or semi-detached housing.

With larger apartment complexes it may be economically feasible to pursue geothermal heat. In this case a more efficient solution could be a heating arrangement using hydronic heating combining geothermal heat, waste heat, topped off with an efficient large-scale boiler (the apartments need hot water anyway), and then pumped into radiators or underfloor heating.

And naturally the most efficient solution of all could be district heating.

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

#336

Post by imtringued »

croes wrote: post #193
hedora wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, Chernobyl was due to a completely incompetent plant manager. They intentionally disabled many fail safes in order to get the plant into a vulnerable state.

And how can we avoid incompetence in the future?

In software development we patch and upgrade libraries to remove security vulnerabilities.

With nuclear plants we first of all do not acknowledge any vulnerabilities and if we do find one we do absolutely nothing because upgrading safety costs billions or requires building a new power plant which costs 10s of billions. Running nuclear power plants in unsafe conditions is an everyday business affair.

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

#338

Post by imtringued »

lobochrome wrote: post #328
funcDropShadow wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... ignoring the fact that the disposal facilities were planned before they decided to prematurely close the plants. That is not true, there are zero long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste in Germany. We only have short term and midterm storage facilities. That is the root problem. Nuclear power plants were build and operated without a plan how to dispose of the waste.

To be fair the same is true for every power generation source that ever existed. CO2, coal slag, disused solar panels, composite rotor blades, all lack a clear strategy for long term disposal.

You can resurface solar panel wafers and then build new ones. Glass and aluminum are easy to recycle as well. Lead free solder is used everywhere.

Only cadmium based thin film solar panels are problematic.

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

#339

Post by 7952 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #233
hedora wrote: post #56

Earlier 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…

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…

Measuring expertise is particularly tricky with the nuclear industry.

Is it enough to be an expert in the underlying physics? Should you be an engineer with experience in any one of the dozens of disciplines? Do you need to be familiar with the specific design of a reactor (that is probably confidential)? Everyone is an expert but no one has a holistic view of everything. It's complicated!

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

#340

Post by imtringued »

ozfive wrote: post #168
hedora wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the beginning of a multi decade conflict. The end game is Russia becoming a North Korean style vassal state of China. Every world leader that is speaking about the conflict seems fine with this outcome. Also, it will take a while for Russia to build enough natural gas pipelines to China. In practice, those pipelines will be Putin's leash. (He will need China, but they have no need for him.) I hope Ukraine mai…

> I hope Ukraine maintains its independence, but it's just the first battle in a war Putin accidentally created, and will surely lose. Putin did NOT accidentally create this war. It's clear that this was intentional and that there are real people suffering because of that intention. He tried opening more doors to see what benefits he could gain. That isn't an accident.

I agree, there is no way an oligarch just simply starts a war he knows he is going to lose. The least you would expect is that he wants to maintain his power as long as possible, not accelerate his demise
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