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Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

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Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#141

Post by TacticalCoder »

jansan wrote: post #58
legulere wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't switch 40 million heating systems overnight, though it's picking up steam ( https://www.waermepumpe.de/presse/zahlen-daten/ ).

Simply install an air conditioner and you will have very efficient room heating (no hot water, though). They cost about 1500€ and are really easy to install. I know in Bulgaria many households have switched from oil heating to air conditioners.

I did just that to my house in France. Everybody here (south east of France) does that. Seen the savings and that it both cools in the summer and warms in the summer, it's a complete no-brainer. In addition to that I switched my open fireplace to an enclosed one: the efficiency when burning wood is greatly increased. And I stockpiled on wood. So should there be electricity shortage preventing me from using HVAC to warm the house, at least nobody is going to prevent me from putting wood in the fireplace.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#142

Post by sapiol »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #29
tomschlick wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who in their right mind Activist politicians who value their cause more than the well being of their citizens.

I don't think this is fair. Although I think some among the anti-nuclear movement may have had subversive intent, most of the people who ended up aligning with that movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right? If you believe in the eventual probability of those doomsday scenarios, and you value the…

> I see no moral fault here.

Why do you appoint morality a higher ground than rationality?

Edit: Typo

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#143

Post by asdff »

dane-pgp wrote: post #128
sokoloff wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no doubt some people who are arguing against nuclear with exactly those pure intentions underlying their advocacy. Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable. I think a lot of people are negatively disposed to nuclear based on beliefs that are not justified by the relative risk and reward of nuclear power generation at this stage in…

> Given the experience of the US Navy in nuclear power generation, I don't think their doomsday scenarios are inevitable. I often see this given as a reason for why nuclear power generation can be safe, but I think it overlooks the fact that military reactors operate in a very different context from civilian ones. For a start, do we know how expensive (per unit energy) US Navy reactors are? It doesn't matter how safe…

We would have known about near meltdowns by now, which probably would have been more common in the early decades of nuclear navy power, considering we know things like how the air force nearly destroyed a huge swath of North Carolina due to an accident involving a nuclear bomb for example.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#144

Post by plextoria »

jsiepkes wrote: post #124
throw827474737 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germany was facing a cold winter Yaaawn.. this doomsday propaganda is really getting old, and lets meet in 6 month again and lets see how much impact and necessity those 3 plants had at all on heating here.. Wait, your are likely not from Germany nor even Europe and state "Germany was facing a cold winter" like fact based on what please?

Germany has 0 LNG capability and is for Gas largely dependent on the Netherlands now that Russia is gone. However the Dutch are scaling down gas operations because of earth quake damage and most its LNG capability will be used internally. So that means no new gas contracts with 2 of their largest suppliers. Germany is going to need the little gas it has for heating and its industry. It's going to need all the gas it…

At least the LNG terminal construction is sped up and “0 LNG” will hopefully not hold true for long.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#145

Post by thescriptkiddie »

legulere wrote: post #42
maliker wrote: post #18

In case anyone was curious, Germany used to get 25% of its generation from nuclear (now more like 10%), and they had as many as 17 nuclear reactors as of 2010. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany

And all of it was replaced by renewables: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiemix_Deutschla...

No, most of it was replaced with extremely dirty brown coal extracted by strip mining.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#146

Post by sllabres »

V__ wrote: post #70
OrangeMonkey wrote: post #4

Good. Germany was facing a cold winter, without energy for heating, and the potential for rolling blackouts. With this change, it does not eliminate the threat but makes it less likely. Who in their right mind would decom any type of energy that could help stave off pain for their citizenship - especially one that has no carbon footprint.

Whether one is pro nuclear or not, I think it makes sense to look at the specific situation at hand. Was it a mistake to shut down all nuclear reactors while not pushing for more renewables and replacing all gas and coal plants first? I think so. Should the last three remaining nuclear plants be kept online? I don't think so. Germany's main source of heating is gas and yes, gas is used to generate electricity, so nuc…

Yes, but it's not Germany alone. A lot of the electricity produced in Germany is exported to other countries. And if this is not longer possible this would be a problem for them too. More aggravating is the circumstance that France, another European country that usually exports electricity cannot too as many (half) of their fleet of nuclear reactors are in maintenance.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#147

Post by felixfbecker »

wander_homer wrote: post #44
jansan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a gas shortage later in winter, which may well happen, people can switch to their cheap electric heaters to at least keep their living rooms warm. I cannot believe that the green party was willing to severly increase the risk of major blackouts out of pure vanity.

> people can switch to their cheap electric heaters to at least keep their living rooms warm The grid isn't build for such a load.

Germany also uses electric stoves for cooking more than gas. An electric stove uses 2000-5000W. The grid handles everyone turning on their stove around the same times fine. Maybe heaters will have to run on top of that, but likely most won't have their space heater running while also cooking.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#148

Post by avgcorrection »

JohnBooty wrote: post #137
Cwizard wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> „If Japan can’t control the technology nobody can“. I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes? Which are essentially non-existent in Germany? In my opinion Fukushima should be an argument _for_ nuclear power. The death toll was really low, roughly 2000, and many of those death were caused by the evacuation rather than radiation. The death toll of the tsunami/earthquake was 15000 accord…

I don't understand this argument, isn't Japan known for its earthquakes? Chernobyl has often been characterized as the result of a corrupt and incompetent late-stage USSR, whereas post-WWII Japan is seen as a generally well-run country. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with that, just trying to describe public opinion.

You’re not countering the implicit argument that Germany won’t have a problem with earthquakes ruining their nuclear powerplants.

Germany is also a “well-run country” if you want to run with the old anti-Soviet argument.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#149

Post by JohnBooty »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #29
tomschlick wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who in their right mind Activist politicians who value their cause more than the well being of their citizens.

I don't think this is fair. Although I think some among the anti-nuclear movement may have had subversive intent, most of the people who ended up aligning with that movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right? If you believe in the eventual probability of those doomsday scenarios, and you value the…

    most of the people who ended up aligning with that 
    movement did have good intentions. They were reasoning 
    that in the long term, nuclear power would bring great 
    misery to humanity. Long term thinking is good, right?
The problem is that those with good intentions didn't think very hard about the issue.

Even the occasional Fukushima or Chernobyl is preferable to the irreversible fossil fuel-induced hell we're about to experience, with potentially billions of people displaced and so forth. It's especially galling since protecting the planet was their entire raison d'etre.

And there were certainly who opposed nuclear power with evil intentions, specifically the fossil fuel industry.

I'm not sure which one is worse. At least the fossil fuel industry never claimed to be noble.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#150

Post by luckylion »

konschubert wrote: post #90
luckylion wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The problem with that position is that pretty much everyone ever believed that their actions would make things better, even if they were very wrong and just made everything worse. Nevertheless, I don't think the anti-nuclear movement is evil. They're guided by extreme fear, not malice. I don't know how you can bring them around though, unless your offering some form of therapy. But even with that, would they…

Some people do things that they know are bad for others because they want to hurt others.

Sure, but I don't believe you run into a lot of actually evil villains in politics that only do what they do because they want to see suffering and want their action to scale instead of ripping the wings from a butterfly one by one. Stalin or Mao didn't just enjoy seeing peasants starve, they believed that sacrificing a million here and there is the price to pay for the communist utopia they thought they were building.
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