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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

#411

Post by makotech221 »

_ph_ wrote: post #299
makotech221 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol completely wrong, the guy in charge of the energy policy in Germany is a major benefactor of GAZPROM so he made Germany entirely dependent on it.

You are referring to Gerhard Schröder, who was the German chancellor from 1998 to 2005. So he was in charge of running the country, not the energy politics specifically in that time, and not in the 17 years following up today. To start with, yes, his later (up to today) involvement with Gazprom is a scandal, bordering on corruption. But had nothing to do with German politics after 2005. He might have been too friendl…

> But had nothing to do with German politics after 2005.

As we all know, each administration has absolutely 0 effect on any future or past administration.

> which we suffer from today, have been made made by the governments which followed his

But not his?

> While deciding about exiting nuclear energy long-term during his government, the switch to renewables was started. If the following governments had fully stuck to that, the situation would already be significantly different.

Weird how that worked out for him then. Must be entirely coincidental; couldn't be because the most powerful people in the world wanted it. Certainly no one from any of the current administration will be found to be beneficiaries of GAZPROM or other oil companies that benefit from keeping renewables and nuclear out of Germany.

Incredibly naive take on the situation tbh. The bourgeois class is literally wasting trillions all around the world on rockets to space, mega yachts, underground car tunnels and whatever pet project, and OP wants us to believe we simply don't have the resources to build nuclear plants that we could make in the 1960's? lmfao.

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

#412

Post by natmaka »

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…

Power dams are historically very safe: See https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

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

#413

Post by barry-cotter »

hef19898 wrote: post #345
barry-cotter wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

And you know that there is no reliable casualty count from Chernobyl? The Soviets didn't count and follow up, nobody else wanted to do that neither. And long term effects, e.g. highe cancer rates, are extremely hard to quabtify and correlate woth a singluar event.

> According to the official, internationally recognised death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190725-will-we-ever-kno...

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

#414

Post by natmaka »

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the...

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

#415

Post by DasIch »

akimball wrote: post #311
DasIch wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas usage for electricity is insignificant and irrelevant for the discussion at large. What Germany is concerned about is usage of gas for heating and in industry. Turn of the gas and realistically, parts of German industry will be destroyed at a 0.5-6% loss to GDP.

Seems a de minimis cost compared to megadeath and a vast refugee crisis

That's only a reasonable comparison to make, if there are no other options. If there are other options, which is clearly the case, you have to compare to those.

A refugee crisis isn't all that bad by the way. Politically it's a problem but economically a 2016 scale refugee crisis every year would be quite good for Germany. Germany needs huge amounts of people, especially people working in trades, to do the work necessary to switch heat pumps, install solar, build more housing etc. They have to come from somewhere and demographics means they have to come from a massive increase in immigration.

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

#416

Post by jaclaz »

Tomte wrote: post #280
jaclaz wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, at least for single apartments/houses (cannot really say for huge multi-apartments buildings) heat pumps that exchange with water exist and are very well suited to in-floor heating (but not suitable for radiators). The generic issue with heat pumps AFAIK is that they have only a relatively small range of temperatures (outside) in which they are actually efficient, in the sense that (with old prices of energy) t…

Sure they exist. But it's more than just "swap one unit with another" which was the claim above. Heat pumps are actually pretty efficient, down to low temperatures. Have a look at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLv0jwu7G_DFVIot1ubOZd... where Alec discusses that. Around Chicago you can expect to have only a few days in winter where the COP is bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFEHFsO-XSI&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...

Not really, of course it depends, but IF the actual heat diffusion system is compatible (fan-coils or under floor) it can be pretty much "swap one unit with another", at least for single units.

Still, to give you a single datapoint, I just replaced on a unit a small gas heater with a heat pump and it was really a "swap one unit with the other", still a few issues came out:

1) the cost of the unit, even considering that it doubles as air conditioning/refreshing was only affordable because of some government subsidies (think of 6-7,000 Euro compared to 2,000 Euro for a gas heater and 2,500 Euro for a more traditional conditioning unit)

2) for some reasons, the heat pump is much slower in heating, the net result (in my specific case) is that the unit needs to be kept slightly heated on weekends (it is a small shop that closes saturday and sunday) otherwise when it opens on monday it will take forever to reach a suitable temperature.

Besides, from an infrastructure point of view, if many people change from gas to electrical (though gas powered heat pumps do exist, BTW) the local increase of consumption from the grid needs to be taken into account.

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

#417

Post by natmaka »

steve_taylor wrote: post #63
choeger wrote: post #3

Being 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.

Baseload: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/180592/european-cooperation-...

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

#418

Post by DasIch »

hedora wrote: post #156
ivan_gammel wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economic effects of stopping gas consumption are not immediate for Russia due to large financial reserves and it will not stop the war. It will certainly harm Russian economy, but several months later and EU has no power to fully stop Russian exports - China is a big consumer too.

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…

> This is the beginning of a multi decade conflict.

Germany is currently removing the dependency on russian gas. There is a consensus on this within Germany. The discussion on this topic revolves entirely around the question of how quickly to do this.

If this is or sure a multi decade conflict, what does it matter if this takes 1-2y instead of 1-2 weeks?

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

#419

Post by someguydave »

Xylakant wrote: post #410
someguydave wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevertheless, more base load means less peak plant use.

That’s not how base load/peak load works. You can’t just increase the base power output - that would lead to too much more electricity in the network, you need to balance the energy provided with the energy used. That’s exactly why you need peak load plants that can follow the load curve quickly. Gas turbines and water turbines can do that, thermal power plants cannot. They’re too sluggish.

I find it quite likely that running higher base load will result in electricity exportable to other European nations who are also trying to quite gas.

The general thrust of your argument seems to be “nuclear power will not help shed Russian gas even a little bit” which seems ludicrous.

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

#420

Post by someguydave »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #254
ozfive wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Maybe OP meant it in the way that Putin wanted to just rush over Ukraine, replace the government and be done with it. That would have been a very short war at best. But that is not the war he got, so yes, he "accidentally" created the current one.

“Accident” implies a lack of responsibility, which is not the case.
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