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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

#341

Post by Schroedingersat »

clemensley wrote: post #258
Kon5ole wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are three arguments that I personally find both reasonable and convincing. 1) Nuclear fuel and waste are clearly dangerous. Your linked article makes a logical fallacy in that it claims a dangerous activity is safe because few people have died from it. But we know things are dangerous even when nobody dies from it. The level of security surrounding nuclear is beyond anything else, and it's required to keep it sa…

1) Can you point to negative implications of nuclear waste? Anyone that got hurt or harmed in Germany for example? 2) If it's too expensive it will not happen, no need for the government to step in. 3) Have a look at the link, some renewables like Biomass emit a lot of C02, all energy sources are trade offs

> 2) If it's too expensive it will not happen, no need for the government to step in.

The government steps in for every second of operation of every nuclear reactor on the planet.

Feel free to pay for your own insurance sans liability caps, find your own loans (without government enforced payment from end users for projects that produce no power), pay for the overruns in decomissioning, and pay for the labour of the regulatory bodies stopping the industry from rendering entire countries uninhabitable.

While you are at it you can control the pollution from uranium mine to the same standard that you'd want in your own back yard and pay for security.

Electricity is a utility and a natural monopoly. The government is always involved and they need to make decisions for what is best in the long term. If you don't have your own enrichment and processing industry then that decision isn't 'become dependent on russia for fuel'. We just saw how well that went.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#342

Post by calaphos »

hedora wrote: post #316
jansan wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is needed in summer to replace solar energy during the night. Gas power plants can be switched on and off almost at will, unlike coal or nuclear plants that have long startup and shutdown times. So the gas power plants are switched on at night in summer when the sun doesn't shine. Also, the EU commission declared in February 2022 natural gas as a sustainable energy source, and the EU parliament confirmed this in J…

Some modern nuclear plants can be turned on and off at will. The reactor itself takes a long time to ramp up and down, but it heats a molten salt battery. The battery can burst-power the turbines at well-above the reactor output; they can be sized to handle peak demand + overnight loads.

Even if technically possible the economics of nuclear power plants don't favour only using them for peak loads. With gigantic initial captial investment and very low fuel costs (almost?) all nuclear power plants are used for base loads.

It's hard to find current numbers, but capital investment for combined cycle natural gas plants seems to be about a tenth of modern reactor projects in western countries.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#343

Post by dane-pgp »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #190
dane-pgp wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

renewables make sense if you can prove to me that you can make them reliable like nuclear, but you can't. Someday I suppose a high density, cheap "battery" tech will happen that will make that true, but right now it's simply not true and the Germans are getting ready to find that out this winter, unfortunately via much higher prices via power imported from adjacent countries using dino-fuel and likely blackouts from…

> reliable like nuclear

To be clear, the capacity factor of France's nuclear power stations is "about 70%"[a] (and was "61 percent"[b] in 1988), while recent offshore wind farms manage a "65% capacity factor"[c].

It's also worth noting that there is less parallelism in nuclear reactor designs than in wind farms, so a single mechanical or structural fault (or just the need for regular maintenance and inspection) can take out an entire nuclear reactor, whereas a wind farm can shut down a single turbine without much impact.

So there are certainly differences in the sorts of guarantees that the different types of power station can provide, but I think you need to be a lot more precise about what you mean by "reliable" in order to judge what, if anything, renewables are lacking as an alternative energy source.

[a] https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pr...

[b] http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/electricit%...

[c] https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/worlds-first-fl...

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#344

Post by raxxorraxor »

dependsontheq wrote: post #87

While I agree that it would have been sensible to phase out coal and then nuclear, the german position is more complex. The fallout from Tschernobyl was measurable in Germany… measurable as in my science teacher measured it in his garden. Up to today boar and mushrooms have an elevated level of radiation in the forests around my home. So this is the emotional background, the risks are not far away. Fukushima gave the…

> was measurable in Germany

It still is measurable. Only 5% of the reactor mass managed to escape into the environment. There are effective safety mechanisms but like in Fukushima they are subject to economic realities. The luck here was that water is a very good radiation absorber. It will still go into the food chain and increase risks. Perhaps not by much if we are lucky.

This is politics and letting them run is populism in my opinion. They won't run longer than to their next security inspection. Even the owners were reluctant because you have to reorganize the demolition, which isn't trivial for NPP.

Nuclear can be a source of energy, but the way it is currently hailed as a solution for climate change should only really convince filthy peasants. Emotional is as much a reluctance to consider better options because it is expensive and there are a lot of unsolved problems. Beginning from mining Uranium to getting rid of the waste permanently.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#345

Post by V__ »

arcticbull wrote: post #263
V__ wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They estimate about 1-2% in gas savings, due to the fact that nuclear is base load and gas plants are used mostly for grid compensation. If the gas storages were empty, and the LNG-terminals weren't about to go online, I would like to see the nuclear plants be kept online. Right now, I'd rather they would invest that money in the future.

Nuclear energy is the future. It's the lowest-carbon and the safest form of energy we know of. China knows this, which is why they're adding 150 new nuclear power plants in the next 15 years. [1] [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-11-02/china-cli...

I think it will be part of a future solution. But building new right now isn't cheap and will just take to long. In addition the old reactors are pretty expensive. I'm looking forward to see how new reactor designs and modular solutions will fare in the next few years.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#346

Post by pydry »

efaref wrote: post #255
karamanolev wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's irrelevant to this particular discussion. I'm not talking about regular "dismantling a nuclear plant", but if 1/100 of the plants have 1000x the cleanup costs due to accidents, that changes the math. I pulled the above numbers out of my hat, they're probably wrong. I'm just adding a bit of nuance to the TCO calculation.

If we're talking TCO we need to calculate the TCO of coal and gas as including the cost of the destruction of the entire planet's climate.

Yes, we do. And, a proper TCO for all forms of energy would result in us only building solar, wind and pumped storage, however.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#347

Post by pydry »

dorgo wrote: post #197
plextoria wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the best explanation I’ve heard so far about Germany’s position on nuclear. It is based much more on emotions than on rational arguments.

Not that there is a lack of rational arguments against nuclear... But climate change may overrule them all.

Or would, if solar and wind werent 5x cheaper per unit of power and 2x cheaper when combined with pumped storage.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#348

Post by HyperSane »

cedilla wrote: post #233
asdff wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't it scary that political decisions about energy are made on reactionary terms rather than engineering terms? An engineer would not have said "we have to stop nuclear power," because of accidents, they would have studied those accidents and developed methods to mitigate them. This is why airlines are safe, because of past accidents that were deeply tragic and catastrophic but often went on to stymie some shor…

It is scary, but it's not quite what happened. The original nuclear exit was a plan over some decades and included a clear exit from coal power as well. It also included a multi billion dollar plan to accelerate renewable energy as well, one that still reaps dividends today. Unfortunately, the Merkel government stopped these subsidies and dragged its feet regarding renewables for sixteen years. The flip-flopping stan…

And now Germany has the most expensive electricity in the world.

Re: Germany extends lifetime of all 3 remaining nuclear plants

#350

Post by pydry »

karamanolev wrote: post #174
epivosism wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was 1 disputed radiation/nuclear related death from Fukushima. And mention of 2200 related to the (post-tsunami) evacuation. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_ac...

That aside, what about price? Completely cleaning up and taking apart the plant could take a generation or more, and comes with a hefty price tag. In 2016 the government increased its cost estimate to about $75.7 billion, part of the overall Fukushima disaster price tag of $202.5 billion. I'm a fan of nuclear, but those are eye-watering numbers.

There is no valid argument against the eye watering price of nuclear power.

The arguments break down into:

* Pretending that solar/wind isnt 5x cheaper per unit.

* Pretending that only pricey batteries rather than cheap pumped storage can accomodate its variability.

* Pretending that there is a geographical shortage of potential pumped storage locations.

* Pretending that you'd need weeks of power storage to get to 99% carbon free rather than hours.

* Pretending that nuclear power does load following rather than relying upon gas to fill in its gaps like solar and wind.

* Pretending that nuclear power always produces 100% stable power. France manages an average of 72%. Denmark has a wind farm that manages 68%.

The only context in which nuclear power is cost effective is if you are keeping rickety old plants running longer than their scheduled lifetime, which isnt safe OR if the government is using it to subsidize nuclear arsenals/subs/etc.

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