It boggles my mind that they would turn off the cleanest, most consistent power supply that exists, now.
"Focus is renewables, not baseload" - that doesn't even make sense, you still need the latter to heat a country through winter (or cool it down during summer, in case of Australia). So I guess on the flat, overcast days they'll burn coal instead, which has its own horrible mix of emissions. Or gas. Bravo, genius.
I'm all for green energy etc, but the focus must be on reducing total emissions. As someone who likes charging their EV from the sun I have experienced how bleak it gets during the Melbournian winter - I'll get 3-4 kWh in a day at worst/too often - maybe up to 8 more normally, compared to closer to 40-50 kWh on my 6.6/5 kWh PV system (rarely less than 30) during summer.
> It boggles my mind that they would turn off the cleanest, most consistent power supply that exists, now.
The end of nuclear power has been a thing in Germany for the last 20 years. Changes of the required laws were already done in 2002, Fukushima was just another data point to stick to this plan.
Most reactors were EOL anyway and the energy providers wanted to offload responsibilites (and costs) to the public.
Nuclear power only made up around 6% of the total energy consumption of Germany, so it's not that of a big deal.
What we need in Germany (now and for the last 20 years) is less bureaucracy for setting up solar systems and lots of development for public/private storage solutions.
The mistake was made 20 years ago, and now the German public seems to start to realize that it was a mistake. For some of us, this is like seeing a train crash in slow motion.
During the tsunami in 2011 (that led to a minor nuclear incident), my facepalm moment was when I realized that the death toll from the tsunami would be eclipsed 1000-fold by the anti-nuclear fallout. (And the nuclear part would be eclipsed 1,000,000-fold).
Expenditures on the "clean up" was beyond excessive. If Germany tries to "clean up" the harmful emissions from burning lignite to a similar safetly level, they will go broke.
Bullshit argument. How would such a cleanup even work? The claim that the Fukushima clean up is excessive is completely pulled out of someones ass. What would be the rationale? You DO understand that exposure to radiation is cumulative, and having radioactive dirt lying around or distributing through wind and whatever else is a problem, right? And we don't even perfectly know what damage that would do long term, if you just leave it alone. There is an exclusion zone around Tschernobyl for a reason. Japan can't afford such an exclusion zone.
Cleaning up "harmful emissions from burning lignite" is complete bullshit. How would that even work? For one thing those emissions or whatever is not radioactive, which is a big plus. For another, those emissions are continously reduced and once they are sufficiently reduced, the planet as a whole will actually clean it up by itself. This will take a long time, of course. Not as long as leaving nuclear waste and radioactive dirt alone and hoping it won't get blown around and harm anyone.
> Bullshit argument. How would such a cleanup even work?
The lowest radiation exposure that is scientifically proven to cause increased cancer risk is ~100mSv, and even then the risk increase is, well, almost unmeasurable.
> You DO understand that exposure to radiation is cumulative
It's not, though, or at least nowhere linear. For continous exposure, <20mSv/year is considered safe enough (if you're a flight attendant, for example). If you compress 50 years of that exposure into a single flight, you get 1000mSv, and probably radiation sickness, possibly death soon after.
When cleaning up after the Fukushima incident, the original plan was to scrub down areas and remove topsoil in areas with >5mSv/year exposure. This was later reduced to anywhere with >1mSv/year. Not only is that 20x lower than what is considered safe, it's also less than the average exposure from "normal" sources in most other areas.
Furthermore, when applying the $1 trillion number, it usually includes compensation to the population, primarily for the evacuation. That part is higher than the actual cleanup.
Now apply this benchmark to lignite. What are the lowest measurable exposure to pollutants that can be shown to increase the risk of severe illness (respiratory, cancer,etc)?
Now find that number, divide by 20, and do the same kind of cleanup (scrub down, topsoil reduction, etc) in all those areas where people are exposed to such levels of pollution. (Hint: it will be most of Germany.)
Then evacuate all areas where people are subjected to health hazards comparable to 50mSv of radiation, from lignite polution. (Probably millions, if not 10s of millions).
On top of that, provide compensation to anyone that has been affected by such polution, at the same amount per unit health impact, as well as, obviously the evacuation above.
Obviously, this is impossible. Germany simply doesn't have the economic resources to do this.
If the Japanese had the same standards for handling the effects of the Fukushima incident as Germans have for dealing with the ongoing polution from lignite, the "cleanup" would be quite cheap.
There is also wind. The mix of wind and solar works quite well in Germany.
Of course, from the carbon point of view, switching off nuclear before coal is a bad idea. But there are a few considerations to be made and the original plans were much more reasonable, but not executed.
- a large driver of decommissioning nuclear was about nuclear waste, safety and also costs
- the original agreement from 2002 didn't set an exit date but a total amount of nuclear energy produced. Which would have meant that some reactors would have ran into the late 20ies
- of course, the plan assumed build up of renewables at best speed
What where the deviations from that plan?
- the CDU/CSU+FDP government first prolonged the life time of nuclear, then after Fukushima shortened it beyond the original agreement.
- at the same time the CDU/CSU led governments from that on did not push renewables enough, at some time they actually started curbing the buildup. As a result, there is far less renewables in the mix than there could have been.
So the original plan wasn't that bad and has been screwed up considerably. Now we have to fix the situation but there is only one way ahead: continue with the switch to renewables at best speed.
It boggles my mind that Germany can decarbonize so much and so fast and so cheaply over 10 years and yet the story it is routinely spun into is that it is a shameful abject failure because in the process of doing that they switched off an aging, overpriced source of green energy that comprised just 6% of their usage.
I think the respective attitudes pro nuclear advocates have to Poland (80% coal->80% coal) and Germany (10%->50% renewables) kind of underscores that nobody is shaming Germany for climate reasons.
France needs to and is decarbonising. Electricity is perhaps the most important (because of electrification) but it's not the only sector. Plus France's electricity has always had the last 20% to deal with.
France didn't decarbonize deliberately and they did it 50 years ago decades before anybody paid any attention to global warming.
Meanwhile theyre becoming progressively more aware of the extreme costs of staying nuclear - costs they kept halfway reasonable by neglecting maintenance which is now biting them back.
> France didn't decarbonize deliberately and they did it 50 years ago decades before anybody paid any attention to global warming.
Whether or not France did or did not decarbonize deliberatly is secondary to the fact that they DID decarbonize.
On the other hand, when Germany set out to decarbonize, they SHOULD look have looked at historical data for what actually produced the desired outcome. But instead they chose to replace their nuclear power with wind power, while keeping fossil power the same.
In 1990, Nuclear power contributed to about 1800PJ/15000PJ of primary energy consumption, or about 12%.
Last year, solar+wind was 6%, or half that.
Then there is a large chunk from "biomass", which is all sorts of stuff, some good for the environment and some that are as dirty as most fossil fuels, but labeled "biomass" to greenwash them. (One of the worst cases, at least globally, would be firewood, especially in terms of local polution.)
At best, "renewables" can be counted to 17.2% for 2022, at worst it's about 6%.
Also, in absolute terms, total energy consumption in Germany has gone down, for several different reasons, but that would have happened anyway, it's not due to wind and solar.
> By all measures
In other words, it really depends on what measures you look at whether or not my statement was true.
I suppose I could be been more concise, though. What I meant, was that new clean energy (meaning primarily wind + solar) has AT BEST only replaced the clean nuclear energy that was available in 1990.
So in terms of available clean energy, simply maintaining those plants (or replace them when they could no longer be maintained) would have provided the same benefit as the massive investments in wind and solar (and those biomass types that are clean).
Still, a reduction in gross consumption is also a good thing, and _some_ of this may be connected to the increase in prices.
Then again, simply enforcing a carbon tax would achive the same.
Correct. France built its reactors after the oil crises of the early 70s to guarantee its energy independence. The irony being those same plants failed at the time of the biggest energy crises since then.
They failed. A quarter was out because of faulty pipes and another quarter was out because of planned maintenance. France had to rely on its neighbors to keep its lights on, and became a net importer of electricity for the first time in decades. And I repeat during the biggest energy crisis in 50 years, which was the entire reason for their existence. Can't fail in a worse way.
As someone who is mostly neutral on nuclear power: The pro-nuclear fanboyism I see on Hacker News and large parts of Reddit is mostly as irrational as the anti-nuclear culture in parts of Germany.
Any thread that mentions "energy" and "Germany" here is full of completely full of incorrect facts about Germany energy infrastructure.
Very hard to reason about. I got that wind turbines do not actually produce more energy than was needed to build them. This is not shown in these charts, i.e. the energy needed to build the wind turbines was largely used outside of Germany, it was part of the price buy them.
> I got that wind turbines do not actually produce more energy than was needed to build them.
Wind turbines generate way more power than what is needed to produce them. Loads of wind turbines will be installed in the North Sea by various countries to generate a huge amount of electricity. I really don't get how you'd think that creating a wind turbine requires way more energy than the electricity it'll produce.
> A 2014 study which looked at the same issue found that 2-megawatt wind turbines installed in Northwest USA paid for themselves in 5-6 months.
> A 2010 analysis of fifty separate studies found that the average wind turbine, over the course of its operational life, generated 20 times more energy than it took to produce. This level was “favourable” in comparison to fossil fuels, nuclear and solar power.
> A 2014 study which looked at the same issue found that 2-megawatt wind turbines
And such wind turbines are nowadays tiny. If you look at https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_windmolenparken_in_d... (Dutch) the column "Turbine vermogen" shows the (average?) megawatt (MW) of the windturbines. The ones planned for 2023 are 11 MW. The ones delivered in 2021 are 9.5 MW. There's a planned windpark with 14 MW turbines for delivery in 2026.
