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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

#381

Post by vishnugupta »

passerby1 wrote: post #372
vishnugupta wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This one[1]. To be clear I haven't read the book. However, I have read quite a bit of his articles and watched his talks all of which I highly recommend.

The crux of the argument is simple enough. One should attach more weightage to opinions of who have stake in what they talking about. For instance, an a bond trader will have more realistic picture of economy than someone like Paul Krugman. Bond trader earns his wages by being more correct about economy. Paul Krugman on the other hand can change his opinion at the drop of a hat with zero negative impact to his earnings.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36064445-skin-in-the-gam...

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

#382

Post by pydry »

p1mrx wrote: post #99
pydry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...other than pumped storage, demand shaping and more grid interconnects.

Demand shaping doesn't really solve the energy availability problem; it's "giving up, with computers."

Wind and solar solve the availability problem - at a fraction of the cost of nuclear power.

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

#383

Post by V__ »

SllX wrote: post #182
V__ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to expand renewables, rigorously cut consumption at all levels, diversify, and rapidly ramp up hydrogen. [1] Russian coal imports are projected to go down to 25% (from 50%) in the next month or so, and by autumn should be more or less zero. Independence from gas should be achieved by 2024. LNG terminals will be build and floating LNG terminals have been secured. [1] https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/EN/Pressemi…

Sounds good. What is the argument against getting those plants back online if that’s how little time it will take? I assume Germany seeks to grow and prosper as a nation, not stagnate at prior energy usage levels, or make themselves overly dependent on imports from another but different nation?

There are multiple reasons, first that 2 years would still be a very optimistic time frame. The energy companies got a huge reimbursement for the shutdowns and are therefore not interested in prolonging, because it would actually cost them more money than investing in other technologies. But the biggest reason is sadly the German publics prolific anti-nuclear views. There is basically zero public support behind the idea.

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

#384

Post by nmehner »

This article is just wrong. The premise is:

  * About 35% of Germany’s gas is used to generate electricity.

  * Eliminating German electricity from gas would thus nearly eliminate Germany’s purchase of Russian gas.
But Germany only uses 12% of gas for electricity: https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/entwicklung-d... this usage has gone down another 15% in January/February 2022 before the war even started: https://www.bdew.de/service/daten-und-grafiken/stromerzeugun...

The author seems to have taken the 35% figure from https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Germanys-Growing-Gas... where is is labeled "Power" in the chart. Whatever that is supposed to mean. But it is not electricity. I could not find any public information about this on: https://www.rystadenergy.com/energy-themes/commodity-markets....

Also some gas plants are used for electricity/heat co-generation so you cannot simply replace them with nuclear. Gas peaker plants have a completely different usage from nuclear plants.

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

#385

Post by jona-f »

funcDropShadow wrote: post #324
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 people died in Chernobyl at explosion time, 28 in the coming months, 30 in the coming years. None died in Fukushima. As far as people's lives are concerned, the death toll of the war in Ukraine is already two orders of magnitude higher. Economic costs are incomparable too.

Tell that to the families of the "exterminators" in Chernobyl. Tell them that it had nothing to do with radiation from Chernobyl that most of them died by cancer years after the accident.

You're emotionalizing the discourse. The people killed by other types of power plants have families too, you know. Your level of propaganda implies an ideological agenda against nuclear power. I do think the general sentiment for environmentalism and against the governments and industries that destroyed the planet was and is justified. But the anti-nuclear ideology was the wrong conclusion and has done more harm than good (lots of burned coal, lots of misguided activists/politicians). Nuclear power is comparatively healthy (even considering your inflated worst-case numbers), albeit expensive.

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

#386

Post by nl »

dzikimarian wrote: post #334
nl wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure what side of the argument you are on.

My point is that authoritarian regimes are possible anywhere; they lead to information being surpressed; and this could be dangerous in the case of nuclear reactors.

The example of Russia seems an excellent example of the same pattern.

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

#387

Post by ivan_gammel »

belorn wrote: post #369
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.

A few years after Fukushima we had a even large evacuation done in California, 180,000 people (and the relocation of a fish hatchery) compared to 150,000 people in Japan. It did not make international news, the death toll was not estimated, and things went back to normal fairly fast. Large evacuations are rare but they aren't that uncommon. It just doesn't get the news attention. It is a bit like traffic deaths, whic…

Disasters like flood or fire don’t usually render large areas uninhabitable - people can return home, rebuild and live as usual. Nuclear incidents on the contrary have long term economic effects and public health dangers. My Russian grandfather died from cancer after unknowingly spending some time in unrestricted area of radioactive fallout 15 years after the incident (see Mayak plant [1] and Techa river [2]). The local population of Muslumovo there was resettled long after the catastrophe when the details of the incident were made known.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayak

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techa

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

#388

Post by nmehner »

nullc wrote: post #305
Archelaos wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Germany has about 40GWh of pumped water storage. This is used for extending solar into the evening/morning (on a typical day about 1300GWh of electricity are consumed in total).

About 5% of electricity need can be provided by Norway through pumped storage (Norway has a storage capacity of about 100TWh, but the grid is limited).

Much more storage will be needed in the future, but many storage projects have been delayed since the demand for them is not there yet.

Rarely 50% of the available coal production capacity is used. There will be spare capacity available for the near future even if a lot more coal plants are shut down.

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

#389

Post by gallexme »

dunefox wrote: post #378
ohthehugemanate wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As (south west) German, I think the world's of medicine here are pretty far apart depending on where you are, as a city person it may be a none issue, but living in the countryside I had no other gp than two homeopathic selling doctors in 23 years(in 1h travel range with public transport) , luckily these days we also have a great gp. But Boi it's pretty ingrained into a lot of older people in my environment to take snake oil over physical therapy/fitting pharmaceuticals.

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

#390

Post by postsantum »

Beldin wrote: post #245
bayesian_horse wrote: post #237

That reads like a nuclear-fan-boy article. No, we can't just waive security requirements to modernize the old plants and keep them save. No, I don't see where you could eliminate all the Russian gas just with those reactors already standing. The war in Ukraine remains us of one thing: You don't want unpredictable things to happen around a nuclear plant. Nuclear power can be relatively cheap. If you subsidize it heavi…

> 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…

>Russia is financially teetering on the edge of bankruptcy

Russia's budget surplus is at all-time high now due to increased fuel prices. I recommend you to revise your sources of information, they may have misled you about that "defaut"

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