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Germany's Energy Catastrophe

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Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#121

Post by cute_boi »

gambiting wrote: post #7
daccle wrote: post #2

Yikes! Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power. Not understanding that nuclear doesn’t play well with renewables (it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time). Finally explaining that there were only 28 deaths after the Chernobyl accident, ignoring all the additional deaths by cancer and deformed unborn children. Sorry, this article is totally wrong in so many ways.

>>ignoring all the additional deaths by cancer Which are, at absolute most and at the most pessimistic estimate, at few thousands excess deaths[0]. The same estimates for coal at are thousands.....per year, not for the last 40 years. [0] https://ascopost.com/issues/may-25-2021/chernobyl-at-35-year...

Well, your comparison might also be invalid because we haven't used nuclear power to the scale coal is used. Maybe if there were many nuclear plants we might have seen many disaster?

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#122

Post by felixlechat »

turbinerneiter wrote: post #49
ElKrist wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And if that wasn't enough, one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia." To be more precise: 5 countries represent 96% of EU uranium imports: Niger (24,26%), Kazakhstan (22,99%), Russia, Australia and Canada. A country like France has 1-2 years of uranium stock for its electricity production. Dependence on Russia is way less critical for uranium than gas.

That's why France got an exception from sanctions made for a uranium delivery from Russia.

Do you have any source to support this claim ? AFAIK, France does not rely on Russia for uranium import. France imports uranium mainly (>90%) from Australia, Niger and Kazakhstan [1].

[1] https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/luranium-importe-en-euro...

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#123

Post by BenoitP »

daccle wrote: post #2

Yikes! Totally ignoring the climate impact of nuclear power. Not understanding that nuclear doesn’t play well with renewables (it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time). Finally explaining that there were only 28 deaths after the Chernobyl accident, ignoring all the additional deaths by cancer and deformed unborn children. Sorry, this article is totally wrong in so many ways.

> it is hard to control the output in a short amount of time

Well, France has been doing it just fine for the last 33 years:

> [...] flexible operation of nuclear reactors is possible and has been applied in France by EDF’s 58 reactors for more than 30 years without any noticeable or unmanageable impacts: no effects on safety or on the environment, and no noticeable additional maintenance costs, with an additional unplanned capability load factor estimated at only 0.5%. EDF’s nuclear reactors have the capability to vary their output between 20% and 100% within 30 minutes, twice a day, when operating in load-following mode

From here (pdf):

https://hal-edf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01977209/document

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#124

Post by tallanvor »

mvgcf wrote: post #77
VaxWithSex wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, 100% green energy in the hands of the citizens.

This. It is 100% green energy. No certificates or whatsoever.

Then they're lying to you. Unless you're on a completely separate power grid, your energy is, in reality, provided by the power source closest to you. It might be solar or wind sometimes, but the rest of the time it's probably a non-renewable source.

German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe.

You can stick your head in the ground and pretend all of the electricity you use is being generated by renewable resources, but as long as plants in Germany are producing power using coal and natural gas, it means you're using that energy.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#125

Post by Ekaros »

tallanvor wrote: post #124
mvgcf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It is 100% green energy. No certificates or whatsoever.

Then they're lying to you. Unless you're on a completely separate power grid, your energy is, in reality, provided by the power source closest to you. It might be solar or wind sometimes, but the rest of the time it's probably a non-renewable source. German companies claiming to get their energy through renewable sources are primarily buying credits from Norway and a few other sources in Europe. You can stick your he…

It's funny that those wind and solar contracts don't stop delivering when there is no supply... Makes one wonder about truth.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#126

Post by BenoitP »

mads_ravn wrote: post #63
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…

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it —- Upton Sinclair. But agreed that this boggles the mind. The only explanation I’ve been able to come up with is lobbying by German industry.

One upside of this crisis, is that the holy German liberal process of economic-politics will self-regulate: After the next winter's gas prices and lack thereof, there will not be any money left going into lobbying.

It is a shame that it will come at such price, though. Who could have predicted that? Literally everyone.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#127

Post by ThePhysicist »

dividedbyzero wrote: post #98
ThePhysicist wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has a round trip efficiency of around 20-25 % I think (more if you can also use the process heat), so we would need to over-provision renewables by 400 % to make it work.

There is a ton of unused roof space that could be decked out with solar, though. There are few heat pumps deployed so far, lots of inefficient old houses that could be modernized, plus there is an array of concepts for other storage tech still at a pretty early stage. It's probably going to be a mix of different generation and storage tech coupled with gains in efficiency, and that seems like it could work out.

Sure, feasible in the long run but don't hold your breath on it to work in the next 5-10 years. China has just doubled their growth targets for solar so producers have trouble keeping up with demand already and we have almost no domestic production anymore, so there's just no way we'll be able to act on this in the near future.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#128

Post by pas »

mrtksn wrote: post #46
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…

Nuclear energy is very cool tech and I think it strikes a chord with techie people and that's why I think nuclear gets a free pass on the economical and operational issues. Nuclear is so amazing, right? Relatively small, high tech self-contained facilities that rhyme with some of the best science fictions out there. However, the moment you dive in it you see just how long it gets to build these things, how expensive…

you know that every form of energy generation today involves some kind of trade off (extraction from the earth, hydro and PV panels and wind turbines require a lot of space, and so on).

nuclear advocates advocate for nuclear when it makes sense.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#129

Post by wewxjfq »

BenoitP wrote: post #118
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…

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would not be wasting currently 5GW of gas for electricity (and burning much less lignite coal as well): https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE > one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1…

The EU publishes official numbers on where they get their uranium from, there is no need to make guesstimates, Russian uranium accounts for 20%. And this ignores that Russia has the largest uranium processing capabilities in the world, so dependency on Russia is higher than the imports of natural uranium suggest.

Lastly, nuclear power plants produce a constant base load while the coal and gas power plants have a very dynamic output and it's simply misleading to pretend that a GW of nuclear energy can replace a GW of coal or gas without taking all of the production into account.

Re: Germany's Energy Catastrophe

#130

Post by cschwarm »

BenoitP wrote: post #118
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…

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would not be wasting currently 5GW of gas for electricity (and burning much less lignite coal as well): https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE > one of the largest exporters of uranium to the EU is... Russia It is a common false perception that it is a problem, very often pushed by fake news outlets. You might be a victim. Russia produces about 15% of the world's uranium [1…

If Germany had kept its nuclear plants, it would be burning about as much fossil fuels as it does now.

That's because without the opposition to nuclear, the motivating reason to build up renewables would have been gone, so it wouldn't have happen. Which means Germany would have continued with about 10 % (of primary energy) nuclear and the rest would have been fossil fuels.

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