Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online • Hacker News Board

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#291

Post by veddox » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:45 PM UTC

KennyBlanken wrote: post #175

thewarrior wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost is irrelevant if you can’t store the energy generated. Nuclear is predictable and carbon free. Look at France.

Nuclear is massive-grid-scale base load only in a world that does not need more base load nor massive grid-scale generation. Everything about nuclear is slow, difficult, expensive, dangerous. They are increasingly not handling climate change well. They are decade-scale projects that take a long, long time to become carbon neutral; we cannot wait that long. * Solar and wind are here to stay and they mean we need fast-…

Thank you for taking the time to go into the details on this! I‘m still sitting on the fence on this issue, because it‘s obviously massively complex and one rarely hears a decently argued take on it (and I don‘t have time to study nuclear engineering and electricity economics). But I think your comment helped me to understand just a little bit more about what‘s involved…

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#292

Post by reacharavindh » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

I know that Germany already invested quite a bit in wind and solar energy. I wonder if Germany, being a rich, progressive, social country, simply side-step all the criticism like what is on this thread by issuing a moratorium on all the existing nuclear reactors - say 6 months, and invest completely in solar and wind over the 6 months to add capacity?

Germany’s geo location makes it possible to be part of the EU power grid sharing the renewable power across neighbours to make it all work. The political cost of such a drastic measure would actually be a nett positive in a country like Germany I hope.

If only politicians stop thinking short term and be the leaders they are expected to be …

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#293

Post by cinntaile » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

hiq wrote: post #201

svara wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree it would have been better to phase out coal before nuclear, but it's not correct to say that there was a switch from nuclear to coal. The switch was from nuclear to renewables. Coal was stable for a long time, and is now decreasing. Coal is currently scheduled to be phased out by 2038. Source: Quick Google image search for the power sources over time plots.

> Source: Quick Google image search for the power sources over time plots. Which plot did you use exactly? Another comment written before yours seems to indicate it's not the case: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28856599 > Coal was stable for a long time, and is now decreasing. Over which time period? The stats in the article they link indicate a switch from 21 to 27% for coal, from 52 to 44% for renewables, wh…

A time period of one year is too short to draw trend conclusions, it really doesn't tell us anything about the (long term) trend. It's like using the weather from last year and comparing it to this year to say something about the climate. Look at 5 years or 10 years to spot energy trends.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#294

Post by nmehner » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #281

WhompingWindows wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables paired with batteries can improve grid resilience, actually. Distribution of generators means less loss in the wires travelling, batteries paired with renewables to provide overnight power and load-smoothing, these are good things. Renewables also are very predictable, so you can use a little natural gas to supplement at night while you build out batteries and more wind. Solar will take care of our day-tim…

I'm not sure there are (can be?) enough batteries in the world, to support the grid for any length of time.

There was a project to try this: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-utility-...

Unfortunatly this project was cancelled since Germany taxes electricity from batteries two times: Once when charging the battery and once when discharging it (since it is then seen as "producing" electricity).

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#295

Post by Cybiote » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

tscherno wrote: post #40

fsflover wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is statistically safer than almost anything even if you take Chernobyl and Fukushima into account.

Sure, I just wanted to point out the sentiment which I feel most have. Smoking was also scientifically safe in the 70s.

That's not accurate. By the 1960s and 70s, the scientific consensus [1] not only strongly believed smoking was a causal factor in lung cancer but also knew it contained radioactive isotopes of Polonium (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2509609/) and lead.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/history/inde...

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#296

Post by gjhh244 » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

aagd wrote: post #104

The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a…

Nuclear is problematic, but it should not be phased out as long as there's fossil fuel used in energy generation. All efforts should go into replacing fossil fuels for now.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#297

Post by jhgb » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:02 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #280

WhompingWindows wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renewables paired with batteries can improve grid resilience, actually. Distribution of generators means less loss in the wires travelling, batteries paired with renewables to provide overnight power and load-smoothing, these are good things. Renewables also are very predictable, so you can use a little natural gas to supplement at night while you build out batteries and more wind. Solar will take care of our day-tim…

How much batteries and renewables do you need to provide baseline power on the level of a single 1000MW nuclear plant? And how will you construct all that sooner than constructing those plants?

Batteries are a bit of a red herring. The combination of pumped storage plants, overgeneration, and demand response already has you covered for at least two decades even in Germany. The minimal cost solution calculated for Germany assumes 1.6 GWh of storage for your 1000 MW nuclear equivalent for a 60% RE penetration scenario, only some of which needs to be batteries (Germany is currently at ~45% or so, many other countries are considerably behind). At the expense of extra costs, lower storage could be compensated for by higher overgeneration (= by not consuming all the power you produce).

However, this was all calculated for current grid conditions. Spread of BEVs would likely put dedicated grid storage needs lower, since in Germany, for each of your 1000 MW nuclear equivalents, there's 700k cars which already have ~600 MWh of storage capacity even just in form of lead-acid batteries, and even replacing just 10% of these cars with 40 kWh BEVs would give you a whopping 2.8 GWh of capacity per your 1000 MW nuclear equivalent, necessitating higher overgeneration to provide the vehicles with motive energy and lowering grid storage capacity because of demand response ("smart charging"). For reference, a 100% replacement of ICE cars with BEVs in Germany would require a ~25% increase in average power generation - by around 250 MW of average power per your 1000 MW nuclear equivalent.

Electrolytic hydrogen production would do exactly the same thing to grid storage - require more generators, and with demand response, lower grid storage capacity. Just replacing German ammonia with "green" ammonia using electrolysis would necessitate another 60 MW of average power generation per your 1000 MW equivalent that could be subject to demand response.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#298

Post by xg15 » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #105

aagd wrote: post #104

The view I share with a majority of Germans: Costs of nuclear energy are very much a burden that future generations will have to carry. A hundered thousand years of safe storage is not part of the calculation of the energy price. It is also clear now that the the companies running the plants will not pay for the deconstruction of the plants after they reached their end of life. Tax payers have to pay for this, and a…

The Germans have switched from nuclear to coal. Can you cut this "future generations are going to have to carry the cost" when the alternative is literally helping destroy the whole planet's ecosystems? Not to mention they spew up significantly more radioactivity in the air than nuclear powerplants. A 30x30m pool of radioactive fuel is nothing compared to what their powerplants are doing to the future of young genera…

Coal is being phased out until 2038 if not earlier.

The future is neither coal, nor nuclear.

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#299

Post by talolard » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

jhgb wrote: post #282

melling wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they switched from nuclear to wind to coal? Coal in the primary source of electricity. If they hadn’t reduced nuclear, coal could almost be gone? “ Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 11.63% of electricity supply in 2017[3] compared to 22.4% in 2010” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany

No, if they hadn't reduced nuclear production, the relative changes between coal and renewables would have exactly been the same, only coal would have had the same uptick from a lower 2020 value. "The increase in coal usage" would have been exactly the same regardless of whether they shut down some nuclear power plants or not. That should be obvious to you. Since this inter-annual change would have happened regardles…

Could you elaborate, im interested in understanding your perspective but couldn’t follow it. In my mind , uptick in coal usage was directly caused by a decrease in wind power production. I understand that if Germany had chosen nuclear over wind, that decline would not happen and thus the usage of coal would not increase. Is that not true ?

Re: Intellectuals urge Germany to keep nuclear plants online

#300

Post by gdavisson » Wed, Oct 13, 2021, 10:09 PM UTC

jhgb wrote: post #282

melling wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they switched from nuclear to wind to coal? Coal in the primary source of electricity. If they hadn’t reduced nuclear, coal could almost be gone? “ Nuclear power in Germany accounted for 11.63% of electricity supply in 2017[3] compared to 22.4% in 2010” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Germany

No, if they hadn't reduced nuclear production, the relative changes between coal and renewables would have exactly been the same, only coal would have had the same uptick from a lower 2020 value. "The increase in coal usage" would have been exactly the same regardless of whether they shut down some nuclear power plants or not. That should be obvious to you. Since this inter-annual change would have happened regardles…

Why would that be the case? Shutting down nuclear plants doesn't increase the production capacity from renewables. For a given renewable production capacity, there's a fixed amount that has to be made up from non-renewable sources; since coal is pretty clearly the worst of those, you use things other than coal -- anything other than coal -- first, and kill off coal as fast as possible.

If you have a way to increase the renewable capacity to make up for a decrease in nuclear production, why not do that anyway, and shut down more coal production instead of nuclear?