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Germany's Energy Catastrophe

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Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#51

Post by throw827474737 »

anttisalmela wrote: post #9
locallost wrote: post #6

Germany proceeded with their "nuclear exit" in 2011. Had they gone the other way and all in on nuclear, they would be in the same situation as they are today as planning and building nuclear plants takes a lot longer than 10 years. Actually they would be way worse because instead of having 50% of electricity coming from renewables, they would still have 45% of it coming from coal, instead of 25% in 2020 (did not chec…

They wouldn't have shut down all the working plants. Not that it matters much, wouldn't have been enough.

This is repeated over and over again, but you have to shut them down ( or heavily sanitize ), because stuff under radiation fire just ages even more quickly than (simplified) normal ""rusting"".. just look at the increased maintenances that risk in France they get blackouts even they compensate via imports?

Just few days ago there was a documetary in ARD, a neutral one, about building back plants to green lawn, the cost and the almost century long effort to build them back that is ridiculous (multiple billions) , that is usually never priced in.

Speaking of cost I found it surprising again how much just building even the new ones is.. I mean they had to compare to a dam to find something worse, wtf? ( https://www.westerninvestor.com/british-columbia/saskatchewa... )

And then also that even if we accept all those downsides, the unsolved waste problem, (yeah a lot of people will give me armchair proposals or the new non-existing reactors that would just eat everything and leave nothing behind... not), that it is not cost competitive, the risk (yes, you tell me Russians are stupid, Fukushima was an exception, 3mile and other incidents were perfectly avoided, but please consider also war and terror), there just wouldn't be enough fuel for the whole word to go all-in (yeahyeh we just scrub it from the sea.. in theory, as much as we could just get all the drinking water from the sea or scrub all the CO2 from the atmosphere with current tech..).

But even if you ignore that again and believe it will be fine, even then if the world would now decide to go all in, the time it takes to build means it wouldn't even make a dent in 15 years - WHICH IS TOO LATE.

We could have avoided a lot if the world went all in renewables the 20-30 years back where we already knew what was coming.. and this is the most surprising thing to me. We could do so much suddenly in regard to Pandemic and now the war.. but in relation to the climate catastrophe they are minor annoyances, still we don't start acting but deter us constantly from the right thing by dreaming of the assumed easy nuclear solution out. Humans!!!

I derailed, sorry. But it will be bad, and nuclear just wont help even a bit.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#52

Post by Tozen »

ajuc wrote: post #23

The funniest thing is - Germany was repeatedly warned by Eastern European states that this (literally this) will happen if they continue to build Nord Stream 1 and then Nord Stream 2 and try to "fix" Russia by trade. Russian government already poisoned Ukrainian presidential candidate in 2004. Killed opposition and journalists both in Russia and in EU. Invaded 2 countries (Chechnia and Georgia - I don't even count Li…

Good points. Germany has long been warned from so many sources (both domestic and international) that something like this situation could happen, yet they ran full speed and head first into it anyway.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#53

Post by anttisalmela »

locallost wrote: post #13
anttisalmela wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wouldn't have shut down all the working plants. Not that it matters much, wouldn't have been enough.

They were old, some came online in the 60s. Check the situation in France right now -- half of their aging fleet is offline because they basically can't get them to work. The NY Times had an article on it recently.

Last 10 gigawatts of shut down reactors were all finished in 80's and probably had half of their design age left, all the really old were shut down already in nineties.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#54

Post by sexy_panda »

locallost wrote: post #6

Germany proceeded with their "nuclear exit" in 2011. Had they gone the other way and all in on nuclear, they would be in the same situation as they are today as planning and building nuclear plants takes a lot longer than 10 years. Actually they would be way worse because instead of having 50% of electricity coming from renewables, they would still have 45% of it coming from coal, instead of 25% in 2020 (did not chec…

Just to make things clear: Nuclear energy is just cheap because it gets massively funded by the state.

Nuclear power plants are the most expensive way of generating energy and the least sustainable way.

We don't even have a good way to dispose nuclear waste. We were checking for a "Endlager" which means a place to hoard all the nuclear waste for hundreds of thousands of years. Guess what? No one wanted it.

Bavaria tried to keep themselves out of possible regions for waste disposal, while going full PR pro-nuclear.

So nuclear power plants are basically neither a long term solution, nor a short term solution.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#55

Post by [deleted] »

inglor_cz wrote: post #21
foepys wrote: post #11

You can still not safely eat mushrooms from the south-eastern parts of Bavaria because they are still contaminated by the Chernobyl desaster. The anti-nuclear stance is not irrational, it has strong roots in reality.

Could this be case of an extreme regulation, much like "everything is known to cause cancer in the state of California"? Czechia, Slovakia, Poland and Ukraine are much closer to Chernobyl than Bavaria is, and the populations there regularly pick and eat mushrooms without suffering a wave of extra cancers.

[deleted]

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#56

Post by throw827474737 »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #38
locallost wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were old, some came online in the 60s. Check the situation in France right now -- half of their aging fleet is offline because they basically can't get them to work. The NY Times had an article on it recently.

> because they basically can't get them to work That's completely BS. More French reactors are off than usual because of delayed scheduled maintenance caused by Covid.

Yeah, that problem didn't even exist already pre pandemic, right? Btw, you believe you can maintain those plants forever?

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#57

Post by locallost »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #38
locallost wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were old, some came online in the 60s. Check the situation in France right now -- half of their aging fleet is offline because they basically can't get them to work. The NY Times had an article on it recently.

> because they basically can't get them to work That's completely BS. More French reactors are off than usual because of delayed scheduled maintenance caused by Covid.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/18/business/france-nuclear-p...

But the industry has tumbled into an unprecedented power crisis as EDF confronts troubles ranging from the mysterious emergence of stress corrosion inside nuclear plants to a hotter climate that is making it harder to cool the aging reactors.

The outages at EDF, Europe’s biggest electricity exporter, have sent France’s nuclear power output tumbling to its lowest level in nearly 30 years, pushing French electric bills to record highs just as the war in Ukraine is stoking broader inflation.

-----

The article also mentioned EDF might need to be nationalized since it's in so much debt, and in fact this was announced a few days ago.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#58

Post by ThePhysicist »

mvgcf wrote: post #10

This op-ed is getting things so utterly wrong, I don‘t even know where to start. The Energiewende (so cool he can make use of a german word, so much credibility) here in Germany is working just fine. It is a reasonable investment in our future. The reason natural gas is a problem right now is not that we have insufficient energy. The lack of gas is problematic because it is a preliminary product used in chemical proc…

Those renewable energy contracts were mostly a scam in my opinion, most of these providers just bought renewable electricity from the stock market when it was cheap and sold it to consumers at a premium, creating zero new renewable capacity in the process. Greenwashing at its finest. And last year when prices for renewables went through the roof due to several unanticipated factors most of them went belly-up and had to "fire" their long-time customers (myself included) because their business models stopped working as they had built zero renewable energy production themselves.

The whole "Energiewende" feels a bit like that: Electricity production was privatized and more than 300 billion € in subsidies went into investors' hands. Now the infrastructure that was created is mostly privately owned and even though renewable energy production currently peaks the prices go through the roof because consumer prices align with the stock market price of electricity and not the cost of production. It really matters how you create renewable energy.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#60

Post by VaxWithSex »

LunaSea wrote: post #37
flohofwoe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a picture says more than a thousand words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany#/medi... Also: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris... Nuclear power is mainly being replaced by renewables, not coal or gas. Natural gas only accounts for 15% of electricity production, the upcoming gap could probably easily be filled with alternatives. But it's main use isn't electricity…

Oh is that why Germany pressured the EU to qualify gas as "green" energy and block nuclear energy from getting the same qualification?

They actually didn't.

New plants only qualify as "green investments" if and only if they can be used to burn electrolyzed hydrogen in the future.

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