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Russian gas flows to Europe

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Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#121

Post by ajsnigrutin »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #51
shmerl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, what was the alternative during WWII? Defeating Nazi Germany for instance. Which is what happened. But surely not doing business with it during the war, that's self explanatory.

And how is Europe commiting collective suicide going to defeat Russia? Must be fun looking in at all this from the sidelines.

I'm an european, and I never understood this...

We sent our soldiers to every shithole america decided to "bring democracy to", but now, ukraine has become so important, that we are willing to destroy our own economy and "passively fight" until the "last dead ukranian", to achieve what exactly?

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#122

Post by Filligree »

kzrdude wrote: post #95
Arnt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems irrational because that's not what's happening. Those power plants can't be run next winter. Contracts have been terminated, replacement parts with long lead times haven't been ordered, maintenance windows have been shifted in anticipation of the shutdown. It's possible to write new contracts and order new parts, so they could be back in operation, maybe sometime late in 2023. But that would still leave them…

We don't know what Europe looks like in 2023 but the electricity will probably be useful then too.

At the rate we're going, I'm not so sure. "Bombed-out wasteland" seems possible.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#123

Post by hnaccount_rng »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you can imagine isn't all that relevant though, once the decision to mothball an installation of this size is made it isn't as though you decide to run your car for another year. This is a massive infrastructure project, with all kind of regulatory hoops they need to jump through to operate safely, including training of employees, gear certification and so on. Starting things back up again could well be a multi-…

Germany's GDP is 4 trillion dollars, its government budget is over 400 billion. Refurbing 3 nuke plants is nothing with those resources. The entire manhattan project that pioneered nuclear power only cost about 50 billion in today's money, but they aren't even starting from scratch like that. If they wanted it to happen I can't see any financial or technical blocker.

But it isn't a problem of money. Sure we could pay for it. But that doesn't make things with a 1.5year lead-time appear in 3 weeks. You can buy _more_ but you can't buy _faster_.

So sure, in a year or two we can get these reactors back online. In 10 or 15 years we can even get new ones. But these time scales don't help in the next winter and on those time scales we can come up with solutions that are even better and not at risk at making eating shrooms you find in the forest killing you..

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#124

Post by _ph_ »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #113
_ph_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To prevent "freezing to death" would require heating, not electricity, which Germany has enough. It is the house heating that is powered by gas. And no one is going to freeze to death, the question is only the impact onto industry.

Electric heat is always an option. If the gas runs out, portable electric heaters could be used, if the electric grid can keep up.

Sure. And it can. We are talking about 3GW of nuclear on a grid which has like 100GW capacity vs 60-80GW consumption. Much more, if the sun is shining or wind is blowing. Yes, it is absolutely annoying to bring back some coal plants into service and using them more overall, but those 3 plants are only a small drip into the bucket.

If they would be easy to run longer, I would be all for it. But big money is better spent into reducing the gas dependency overall.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#125

Post by realcertify »

_xnmw wrote: post #93

It's far too late to change this. You cannot restructure the energy sources of a whole continent in a few months or even years. This could've been fixed if the West had understood and reacted appropriately to the magnitude of the Russian threat about 10 years ago, as foreseen by academics like Stephen Cohen and businessmen like Bill Browder, instead of blindly falling for its own hubristic self-delusion (which contin…

Absolutely agree. And one more thing that looked incomprehensible just a short while ago was that Russia could completely shut down the gas flow to Europe (Russia needs money for the war in the end, so why would it do it?). However it seems quite a possible scenario as of now. Stakes became quite high, and unfortunately very little (if any) work is carried to stop the conflict and start negotiations.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#126

Post by poisonborz »

_xnmw wrote: post #93

It's far too late to change this. You cannot restructure the energy sources of a whole continent in a few months or even years. This could've been fixed if the West had understood and reacted appropriately to the magnitude of the Russian threat about 10 years ago, as foreseen by academics like Stephen Cohen and businessmen like Bill Browder, instead of blindly falling for its own hubristic self-delusion (which contin…

> Ukraine could somehow "defeat" Russia while still avoiding WW3

Why? These kind of cold-war era proxy wars happened throughout history. One big power makes a move directly or indirectly, while the other side will be supported indirectly by other powers. It becomes a pure resource war, and no party has a reason to escalate it beyond the conflict zone. Russia has no reason to open new fronts even if NATO props the war zone, or covertly supports sabotage attacks within Russia's border - the same way the US or China fights proxy wars, based on success, they take it or leave it (for the time). Ukraine is a long term strategic investment for Russia, not a life and death struggle.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#127

Post by jhgb »

clemensley wrote: post #76
_ph_ wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. As already noted by other posters, the decision to decommission these plants was made years ago. 2. As a consequence, the plants are in no shape to be run much longer without major refurbishment, rehinring and training personal. Also, the fuel rods are basically spent, new ones would have to be ordered and manufactured which takes quite some time. Want to guess where most fuel rods came from? (spoiler: Russia) 3.…

> Want to guess where most fuel rods came from? (spoiler: Russia) Can you back that up? To me it looks like only 5% of uranium is in Russia ( https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/uranium-p... ) > They wouldn't have saved much, if any, gas burning Compare to coal (that seems to be the tradeoff in Germany) nuclear energy kills 820x more people per produced energy unit. 820x the number of human lives lost.…

> Can you back that up? To me it looks like only 5% of uranium is in Russia

It's not about mining. You need to enrich uranium first, and a massive portion of world's industrial capacity for that is in Russia: https://www.energypolicy.columbia.edu/research/commentary/re... - "Russia had around a 46 percent share of global enrichment capacity in 2018".

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#128

Post by ajsnigrutin »

hourago wrote: post #119
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find most sad is, how differently we treat eg. USA when they decide to destroy a sovereign country due to their interests, compared to eg. now russia... I'm from slovenia, and we even sent soldiers to help them in afghanistan, and we still have them in syria... somehow noone mentions words like "war", "occupation", "civilian deaths" etc., when our soldiers are there...

> somehow noone mentions words like "war", "occupation", "civilian deaths" etc., when our soldiers are there... Read more newspapers. You can choose: https://www.google.com/search?q=civilians%20dead%20in%20afgh...

This is google, so results might vary, but this is the first result for me:

https://reliefweb.int/report/afghanistan/civilian-casualties...

"Civilian casualties of explosive violence mount as Taliban capture Kabul"

Somehow wikipedia is only the second link, mentioning the actual numbers of civilians.... but again... when was the last time news like this made headlines? When was the last time anyone imposed sanctions against countries killing civilians there?

Also, considering we're still there (eg. syria), we're still the occupying force there, why is there not daily reporting of what we did there and how bad it was? Why are there not international efforts to pull our soldiers out of there?

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#129

Post by frosted-flakes »

_ph_ wrote: post #124
frosted-flakes wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Electric heat is always an option. If the gas runs out, portable electric heaters could be used, if the electric grid can keep up.

Sure. And it can. We are talking about 3GW of nuclear on a grid which has like 100GW capacity vs 60-80GW consumption. Much more, if the sun is shining or wind is blowing. Yes, it is absolutely annoying to bring back some coal plants into service and using them more overall, but those 3 plants are only a small drip into the bucket. If they would be easy to run longer, I would be all for it. But big money is better spe…

Oh I agree, trying to backtrack and re-open those plants now is probably pointless. I'm just saying that gas is not needed for heat.

Re: Russian gas flows to Europe

#130

Post by [deleted] »

userbinator wrote: post #72
slenk wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is any world where getting rid of nuclear power is better...it's one of the cleanest, least deadly forms of power generation.

The biggest concern is that when things go wrong with nuclear, they really go wrong.

[deleted]
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