With no nuclear weapons program there is not enough national impetus to maintain a reactor program, especially in face of determined Green opposition. I think only Japan has a large civilian nuclear capability without dual use.
Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
371–380 of 480 posts
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#372Earlier 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…
> 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.
Interesting. Which of his books do you refer here to?
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#373Being anti-nuclear is deeply engrained in the DNA of Germany's green party. Even more so than climate change. In fact, when the anti-nuclear movement started, climate change wasn't even a topic. In other words, the only thing that needs to happen is the German green party to admit a mistake in fighting nuclear power harder than fossile fuels...
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.
There's not a 'baseload problem', there's a 'supply meeting demand problem'. And nuclear and renewables are not a good combination to solve that problem, because they don't complement each other at all: what both would need to efficiently supply the grid is either lots of storage or highly dispatchable cheap generation. The former is being developed and the latter exists but is still fossil fuels. The other option is massive overbuilding, which is far more doable with renewables because they're so cheap.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 geoth…
Our apartment complex uses a gas micro power plant to produce electricity and uses the waste heat for heating/warm water. It’s a building of its own on a compound with 20 or so apartment buildings. Replacing that with a heat pump will require some very serious planning efforts - apart from the requirement that like 1000 individual parties in 20 home owner associations would approve the change. Not going to happen this year.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#375Sorry to say, but this article is crafted weakly and doesn't even deserve to be discussed this much.
It was written with a theory in mind ("Irrational German Angst of Nuclear") and only points out things in favor of this theory, sprinkled with some nice diagrams here and there and, to make it appear scientific, a list of footnotes and citations. It's clearly missing out describing the components of the German Energiemix and the areas of usage for gas (i.e. NOT just for electrical power as nuclear is but VERY important as a commodity to the German chemical industry and for heating in civilian housing which cannot be quickly replaced by sth else).
Even worse, it is parroting stereotypes about the Greens party the German conservatives have been busy spinning for decades for political reasons. I'd really like to have a good conversation about this topic but this just reads like a cheap trolling attempt.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pyramids? (Granted, the contents were not highly dangerous, but they would have been adequate for nuclear waste storage until at least now.)
And most of them were looted.
Spot on. Even USSR-time RTGs have been looted, causing contamination and deaths, despite people being aware of nuclear power for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#377Earlier 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.
This is pre-war thinking though. Germany needs to think of itself as being at war and mobilise as such. Less efficient portable heaters can be used as stopgap measures, qualified heat pump technicians can be brought in from other countries, people with transferable skills can works as installation assistants, local production of electric heating systems can be increased (convert other factories if needed). It's Sprin…
One could also ask for the US to replace their car centric mobility with bikes and trains to save oil. It’s spring right now, they’ve got 6 month until
winter rolls around, time to be used wisely.
Our apartment complex uses a small central gas power plant to produce electricity and use the waste heat for heating/water, supplying about 20 buildings with roughly 500 - 1000 units. Replacing that system is not something that’s planned and executed within a handful of months. I’m not convinced that air heatpumps of the required size even exist - drilling for a ground heat pump in a city will require even more planning.
How well would it work if all of those unit just pulled another extra 5kw continuously from the grid for heating, not to speak of warm water? I’m not even convinced that the grid itself could sustain that - it’s never been planned for that kind of usage.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just the green parties. There's a sizeable part of the population in the German speaking world (and I'm sure elsewhere too) that just views nuclear power as something unnatural and perverted. Something that's always going to be more dangerous than beneficial. I think this notion started even before the Chernobyl accident but that plus Fukushima really reaffirmed the fears lots of people had. It's a very shor…
my personal experience living in several places in Germany: the whole appeal to nature argument is unreasonably effective here. Most germans will try an array of homeopathic remedies before taking ibuprofen. Most GP doctors advertise a secondary expertise in some woo or other, be it homeopathy, crystals, or osteopathy. It is downright tricky to find a doctor who will give you evidence based pharmaceuticals for your c…
this is plainly wrong or exaggerated. I have never had a single doctor tell me to use homeopathy or something similarly silly, and I've been to quite a few doctors. Also, it's not 'most germans' who even consider homeopathy as valid, it's a portion.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#379> 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 e…
That’s what you have a grid for. It’s not cloudy and windstill at the same time all over Europe.
Also you can have similar problems with nuclear too. In the last 4 months Germany has been exporting a lot of electricity to France because several nuclear reactors of the same type had to be shut down because they may have a common flaw.
Re: Why Germany won’t keep its nuclear plants open
#380What most of these articles don't get, is how unpopular nuclear was among Germans. It was not just the Greens party, the rejection was more wide and in the end a majority.
Nuclear power financing, accidents, storage and disposal discussions fueled major civil unrest for decades.
Also most of the Russian gas is used in the heavy industries, you can't simply switch those factories to electrical heating. As for electrical heating of households, yeah that was a thing until maybe the eighties? Nobody does that anymore. Not sure our power grid, which is being decentralized, could handle that?