Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

spiegel.de

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 304 posts

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#101

Post by tpmx »

rgbrenner wrote: post #97
tpmx wrote: post #15

And still the current plan is for Germany to shut down its few remaining nuclear reactors by the end of the year, while the company/companies maintaining them are saying they can keep them running? Please stop the shutdown, ffs, are you insane? Let's try to stop Germany from harming itself further via international pressure. Blame and shame. Call them idiots to their faces. Point fingers. They need to shocked. The ge…

If you cant build new plants, I dont think the solution is to run old plants forever until they fail. Shutting down old plants should have nothing to do with being pro/anti nuclear. Everything has a life span.

The plants are being shut down because of political concerns. From a technical POV they can keep running. Vattenfall was also forced to retire nuclear plants in Germany way ahead of schedule because of german politics a few years ago. That was stupid.

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#102

Post by rullelito »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #93

As a German I don't care. I just want two things: 1. The energy company pays market rate insurance for their nuclear plants. Not "we take the profit, taxpayers pay for the disaster" 2. The energy company sets up a trust to pay for the safe storage of nuclear waste and cleaning up the plant should they go bust (again "we take ...")

Isn't this already how it works?

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#103

Post by [deleted] »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #93

As a German I don't care. I just want two things: 1. The energy company pays market rate insurance for their nuclear plants. Not "we take the profit, taxpayers pay for the disaster" 2. The energy company sets up a trust to pay for the safe storage of nuclear waste and cleaning up the plant should they go bust (again "we take ...")

[deleted]

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#105

Post by cycomanic »

seydor wrote: post #77
cycomanic wrote: post #35

It is interesting to note how everyone talks about the dependency on gas in Germany, while nobody mentions France. If we look at the two graphs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/En... https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/abm6r4/germanys_en... We can see that both Germany and France use about the same percentage of gas in their energy mix. Making this discussion a reason to revive nuclear…

France has less dependence on russian gas , it doesn't have germany's large industry that is also dependent on russian gas, their nuclear will be there in the future, they have 4 LNG terminals and they are quite sunnier. I believe france's nuclear is currently offline that's why the higher gas usage.

The gas use has been similar for the last 10 years. Now you're correct in absolute numbers Germany uses more gas, it has more citizens, more energy intensive industry etc. and yes they are less dependent on Russian gas (most of their gas seems to come from Norway [1], although the second biggest source is Russia). I actually agree making Germany dependent Russian gas was a terrible idea. Germany actually had a unique opportunity in the late 90s early 00s, they could have really pushed for a transition to a mostly renewable energy production, but instead strong lobbying won out. And the lobbyists were the fossil and nuclear sectors (i.e. the large energy corporations). One thing one can see again and again is that the nuclear lobby is never arguing against fossil energy, but only against renewables. The reasons are simply that they largely have common interests, highly centralised energy production, with strongly subsidised plant construction, which guarantee long term profits. Renewables are actually disruptive, because they allow for very distributed energy production putting into the hands of small investors and relatively small construction industry. They threaten the large profits of the old model.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/ueipzd/country_of_o...

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#106

Post by ThrowawayTestr »

rullelito wrote: post #102
KingOfCoders wrote: post #93

As a German I don't care. I just want two things: 1. The energy company pays market rate insurance for their nuclear plants. Not "we take the profit, taxpayers pay for the disaster" 2. The energy company sets up a trust to pay for the safe storage of nuclear waste and cleaning up the plant should they go bust (again "we take ...")

Isn't this already how it works?

Yes. Unlike gas and coal, nuke plants have to pay to clean up their waste before it's created.

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#107

Post by rullelito »

cgb223 wrote: post #6

Can any Germans on HN explain why Germany finds it preferable to give up their energy independence in nuclear and instead buy it from their potential adversary in Russia? What possible advantages are there to buying the resource that literally keeps the lights on from a country that you have conflicts with?

Also curious if the sentiment changed at all after 2014 (Crimea).

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#108

Post by T-A »

cycomanic wrote: post #35

It is interesting to note how everyone talks about the dependency on gas in Germany, while nobody mentions France. If we look at the two graphs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/En... https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/abm6r4/germanys_en... We can see that both Germany and France use about the same percentage of gas in their energy mix. Making this discussion a reason to revive nuclear…

But as of April, only 17% of France's gas imports came from Russia:

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/04/27/h...

Re: Germany sees shift in sentiment toward atomic energy

#110

Post by KuiN »

seydor wrote: post #77
cycomanic wrote: post #35

It is interesting to note how everyone talks about the dependency on gas in Germany, while nobody mentions France. If we look at the two graphs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/En... https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/abm6r4/germanys_en... We can see that both Germany and France use about the same percentage of gas in their energy mix. Making this discussion a reason to revive nuclear…

France has less dependence on russian gas , it doesn't have germany's large industry that is also dependent on russian gas, their nuclear will be there in the future, they have 4 LNG terminals and they are quite sunnier. I believe france's nuclear is currently offline that's why the higher gas usage.

Yeah, the drought in Europe has dried up or made too warm the rivers used to cool French nuclear plants.
Post reply on HN