Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open • Hacker News Board

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

#351

Post by glogla » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:25 AM UTC

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #132

zemvpferreira wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm from Portugal, where renewable power generation percent swings between the low 60's and the high 80's depending on the month and where we don't have any need for gas heating whatsoever. I also personally own and tend to 70 hectares of forest so I'm pretty willing to bet my carbon footprint is way way better than yours. According to your nonsense standard I should be a credible person to make this comment: Ho…

> Well I'm from Portugal, where renewable power generation percent swings between the low 60's and the high 80's depending on the month and where we don't have any need for gas heating whatsoever. Yes. Sure. The country is roughly 4 times smaller than Germany, the population is 10m vs 83m in Germany and you don’t get continental climate.

Things should be easier in a larger country due to economics of scale. Also Germany is war richer than Portugal.

Germany uses fossil fuels because they want to, not because they have to.

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

#352

Post by lispm » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:31 AM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #301

lispm wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The reality looks like this: https://www.bge.de/en/asse/short-information/

Nuclear waste buried underground. Didn't work like planned. Now it needs another several billion Euros to deal with that failure.

It took less than 200 years to waste several billion Euros on a failed storage site. It wasn't even for highly radioactive waste.

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

#353

Post by freemint » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:34 AM UTC

kleene_op wrote: post #252

freemint wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yeah and making the solar panel, how green is that? Depending from where you buy them, quiet green. Produced with 100% renewables, made in Germany with polysilicon made in Europe. Why do you seem some emotional as if your identity is at stake here?

> made in Germany Not trying to defend the parent comment going off about bouncy castle, but I have a hard time believing that statement is true. This is the share of photovoltaic pannel production per region. https://www.statista.com/statistics/668749/regional-distribu...

I am not saying that every panel is. I am just saying there are companies which do exactly what i claimed exists. In particular i was referring to Meyer-Burgers. This company was a developer of photovoltaic production machines which they sold around the world but they recently shifted to building and owning their own high automation "giga"factories and have plans to build them in various western countries producing premium, long lasting cells with top efficiency. Those panels are sold today too. By the end of 2022 they claim to >2.0 GW (with plans to extend it to 2.8ish GW) of solar panel manufacturing capacity which gives them 1.X% market share world wide. Since they are a publicly traded company we will learn whether they made it or not.

They also their own line of solar roof tiles in the pipeline.

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

#354

Post by kwhitefoot » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:35 AM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #224

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.

Battery manufacturing, at least with the chemistries we have available right now, won't scale to the point where we can store several weeks worth of power in the foreseeable future. Afaik Power2Gas is the only currently available technology that can be scaled relatively quickly. Most countries already have the infrastructure for strategic gas reserves.

Why would you need to store several weeks worth of energy?

> Most countries already have the infrastructure for strategic gas reserves. Some do. Some that you might think would, do not, UK for instance.

"The Rough storage facility in the North Sea, owned by British Gas owner Centrica, provided 70% of the UK gas storage capacity for more than 30 years before it shut in 2017 following a government decision not to subsidise the costly maintenance. ... The UK’s stores hold enough gas to meet the demand of four to five winter days, or just 1% of Europe’s total available storage. The Netherlands has capacity more than nine times the UK’s, while Germany’s is 16 times the size."

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...

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

#355

Post by kwhitefoot » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:37 AM UTC

mike_d wrote: post #283

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.

The baseload solution for renewables is nuclear. Most of the "concerns" people have are the result of propaganda and lobbying by the American Petroleum Institute. Most of the original flower power anti-nuclear groups were funded by oil.

> Most of the original flower power anti-nuclear groups were funded by oil.

Where does that come from? I'm pretty sure I wasn't funded by anyone when I protested against the building of the Torness station on a site of special scientific interest (SSSI).

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

#356

Post by mreiner » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:42 AM UTC

Starting an article with an emotional war picture makes me sceptical of the authors intentions.

IMHO he shrugs of the main issues without discussing in on the technical level you would expect for the risks involved here. He basically argues politics should trump engineering realities to cut corners. While this is usually fine in a startup environment, it's a bad idea for environments like space, healthcare, aviation or nuclear. We all know how it worked out for Boeing recently.

I would really like to see the numbers if you remove some of the heavy industry we don't need to keep running in Europe. This load removed, how much of the remaining base load throughout the hole year is really provided by gas, as this is the true load that could possibly be replaced by nuclear, from 2023 onwards if I may believe other comments.

I'm curious, but I find it hard to believe this would do anything for our friends in Ukraine NOW, so if this is our concern we should probably talk about other levers instead of recycling the nuclear debate.

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

#357

Post by spupe » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #331

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.

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 pea…

What about prolonged weather crises that may affect supply for weeks on end? And how would that affect working hours in factories? How much of a GDP hit are we going to take by using "flexible consumption"?

There is no way to run a modern economy with intermittent energy supply.

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

#358

Post by csisnett » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:43 AM UTC

bayesian_horse wrote: post #259

partiallypro wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear can't replace the role of gas in Europe, but getting rid of nuclear makes the problem much worse. Germany has been warned about this constantly and they seem to think they know better. We'll see, right now they look like stubborn fools that are now unable to do much of anything to help stop Russia.

I have seen a lot of stubborn fools who keep claiming nuclear power is safe and the impossible accidents either don't happen or aren't really that bad. "Much of anything" is a malevolent exaggeration. Germany is basically changing its entire stance on military spending, sending tons of weapons and other supplies to Ukraine, taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees and risking its economy by enacting strong sanctio…

If you need foreign gas to keep people warm during the winter you're not doing ok

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

#359

Post by _moof » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:46 AM UTC

hedora wrote: post #56

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…

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…

I went to grad school. I never, ever claim to be an expert in the field I studied, because I have virtually no real-world industry experience in it. Two more years of school does not make one an expert; it prepares one to become an expert.

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

#360

Post by spupe » Fri, Apr 15, 2022, 9:49 AM UTC

legulere wrote: post #176

> Green is good, but it’s also more focused on the environment than on geopolitics. Shows how little the author understands about German politics. Greens are also ideologically against delivering weapons into crisis areas, however they were the ones pushing for weapons delivery the strongest. Also they gave up on getting out of coal earlier which was their main goal in this government. Why? Because they are doing Rea…

And if there is no wind or sun for an extended period of time, I guess we just shut down our factories then?

The fact that the Greens have been flexible in some elements of their politics doesn't mean they are committed to a realpolitik approach when it comes to energy generation. They absolutely are not. In fact their record when it comes to science is really spotty, as they also oppose transgenics and even animal experimentation to a certain degree. They are clouded by preconceptions that are dangerous to us all.