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FFS, people are stupid.
There was a huge hysteria about nuclear when Fukushima happened. A clear majority was for immediate action. Merkel's coalition government would have ended if she hadn't done a 180 on nuclear and decided to shut down nuclear as soon as possible, which was 2023. I was against shutting it down back then but I thought you can't go against the whole population, so I get why they did it. People didn't change their mind until 2022. Nobody talked about reversing that decision in all these years when there was actually time to reverse the decision.
Now, that the last reactor is shut down, the same people that were up in arms in 2011 are now up in arms that we don't have nuclear. Building new plants will cost billions and take decades and nuclear doesn't work well with renewables because of its inflexibility. It makes no sense at all. It was a long-term decision we can't just back away from. What's done is done.
I like that you mention the point, Merkel's coalition made a full 180 turnaround. Which was an error. They could have just made a plan for phasing out the reactors until maybe 2040 or 2050. No, they had to stop them right away and now the existing plants are so gutted that they are not feasible to be rebuilt again.
Anyway, building new power plants takes centuries in Germany. So we should just focus on renewables *and storage solutions now.
Right away being over a decade later at pretty much the end of life of those plantd without refurbishment.
Uuuuh, why wouldn't it? Nuclear can provide a steady base load for the grid while the renewables are providing the rest, filling up storages for spike times if there is an excess. Don't really see how this is a big issue.
The issue is nuclear reactors become more expensive the less load they have.
As we build more renewables, nuclear energy will decrease in cost efficiency as renewables and storages start handling base loads.
The problem isn't so much that it can't work, it's that it will not be cost efficient long term.
How can they start handling base loads if there is literally no sun or wind (as happens reasonably frequently). You either need a ton of storage which is its own environmental can of worms or nuclear
Cost. You do not need much storage for a 95% renewable grid. For the last 5% nuclear baseload is still way too expensive.
I suspect that we will utilize a gas peaker plants for the last 5% for a long time; i couldn't think of a much better option.
Irs batteries. Today's car batteries become tomorrow's grid storage feed stock. Also battery tech is getting a cost decline through scaling so every year a nuclear plant isn't built the math gets better for grid storage. Also adding more batteries to existing sites is way easier.
Nuclear works well with renewables. It provides reliable base load while the renewables and batteries can be used on top of that. Plus the fuel can be sourced from friendly nations like Canada.
Also worth noting that 15 years is a long time. SMRs are starting to be built and France is planning to build a bunch of nuclear capacity in the near future which might mean the possiblity to import cheap energy or leverage the human resources from those builds.
Nuclear works well with fucking nothing because it doesn't work... because it's just too fucking expensive, has to be shut down when it's too hot and is so dangerous you can't even find insurance. Base load can be provided by hydro, gas (which can be sourced sustainably) or batteries, all of which is cheaper, less dangerous and more easily available than nuclear.
Well its going to get more expensive relative as well as oil prices fall globally due to recession. But then we will hit another energy shortage and it will become cheaper, which is why France started building nuclear in the 1970s to begin with.
It seems to me nuclear takes you off the ebb and flow of global energy prices, I'd prefer spending on nuclear rather than carbon capture which seems to be the existing plan of many countries to combat climate change.
How exactly does nuclear decouple you from global dependencies if there are less than 20 countries with more than 100k tonnes of uranium reserves, with only one of them being in the EU?
Lol, sure. Says who?
Good example... The country that has to heavily subsidise power so people can still afford it.
You don't miss the water until the well runs dry.
in retrospect, i understand France's long-held stance around 2000 that it wants to rely mostly on nuclear. it wasn't clear, back then, how long fossil fuels would be available (it was predicted they would last another 40 years) so they thought "oh well, uranium will be available for a longer time". renewable energy wasn't an (economic) possibility at that time. now that we have cheap solar energy, i suspect the last nuclear power plant worldwide will be shut down sometime around 2040.
2040 huh?
My prediction is a record number of new plants going online in 2040.
Especially as there are literal factories being built to specifically crank out Small Modular Reactors.
We're looking at a future where every small town can have their own reactor, providing enough power for that town but not large enough to ever melt down.
i suppose you're also thinking that's because we need steady output?
which is a fallacy; we had constant generation in the past so consumption adapted and became constant; consumption would not naturally be constant, it would be higher in the daytime.
Wind and solar cannot set grid frequency.
They just can't. You need a turbine to set frequency.
And yes, the grid frequency matters.
So yes, we will always need a base load. And what better way than a small modular reactor, keeping the grid local and modular.
Or we can build out so much wind and solar that we have to have massive transmission lines running across the country, and then we would still need to curtail that power during peak supply, while also not getting enough generation when solar and wind fail.
And then you still need a turbine to set the grid frequency.
I was against shutting down already written off power plants early while coal power plants were still running. I was in favor of shutting down coal first, yes.
And the funny thing is that coal power plants are actually more radioactive to the environment than nuclear power. Sure, accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima change the statistics by quite a lot, but for the absolute majority of nuclear plants they are way less radioactive to the environment than any given coal plant around.
Also there's not that many severe nuclear disasters in the history. Coal and other organic fuel plants cause far more casualties globally than nuclear ever did. But maybe it's easier to accept slow death of a lot of people due to cancer and whatever caused by organic fuel power plant emissions than single large spike when nuclear power (very, very rarely) goes wrong.
Well, if that's so rare and can essentially be ignored, I'm sure you'll easily find insurance for nuclear plants that will cover the cost of a potential disaster. I mean, after all, it evens out over all the nuke plants, right? The market handles it, right?
There's a ton of stuff going on all the time which no amunt of insurance will cover. Modern nuclear generators just can't blow up like Chernobyl. Fukushima is a bit different, but maybe we shouldn't build reactors in places where they can be hit by a tsunami in the first place. And even there the environmental impact was somewhat limited.
And that doesn't change the fact that shutting down nuclear plants and replacing their energy output with coal caused more radiation in ash and other particles which are spread out of the chimney to the environment as a part of normal operation.
And what exactly would that be? Essentially everything has insurance.
Yeah. And what's stopping other stuff to be "a bit different"?
Japan got damn lucky the wind blew everything seawards. If the fallout had hit Tokyo, this would have been a very different story.
And who did that? Nobody. There were no new coal plants to replace anything. That statement is straight up misleading. The old plants were kept running, yes, and they kept emitting, yes. And that's always the thing that's being brought up, "they could have taken the coal plants offline sooner had they just kept the nuke plants running a little longer". But that's an entirely different thing than "they replaced nuclear with coal". Nobody did that. Had they not tanked the German market for renewables, the coal plants would have been taken offline earlier, too, but for some reason that's never the sob story. Instead, people keep bringing up nuke plants time and time again, which is just weird. Yeah, coal and nuclear both destroy the planet. Let's not see which one's marginally worse but instead maybe just push something that's actually good for the planet?
Here's a list of one type of that kind of disasters where, despite of insurance, various kinds of environmental damage has been left behind which may or may not completely heal, or at least it takes a long, long time.
Here's a pretty public different kind of disaster which I guarantee was not 100% covered by insurance either. Here's another. I'm not building a comprehensive list, there's just too many and their impacts vary wildly.
Then there's the waste management in poorer countries which also cause immeasurable damage to the environment all the time by using a nearby river as a sewage for everything. Here's one example which made into the headlines back then. And here's a list of similar examples.
Go read yourself:
And remember that the pollution which kills people just because breathing smoke and ash is bad, it's also radioactive.
That would be really nice. We just don't have the alternatives ready to go for that just yet. Here in Finland, on a good day, renewables produce more than nuclear, but those are exceptions. Feel free to look up the data in finngrid service. There's currently over 7000MW worth of turbines around but it's pretty common to have even less than 200MW of wind power in the grid and that unreliability needs to be stabilized with something else.
I have no idea how you get the idea that oil spills aren't covered by insurance. In fact, denying insurance is the easiest way to keep vessels out of your waters because they just won't go where they aren't covered. If something isn't cleaned up properly it's certainly not because of the lack of insurance.
Your next example was the Beirut explosion. First, I'm pretty sure there was somebody there who was liable. The issue is, though, that if that event wasn't covered by insurance (which I guess it wasn't, just because it was a shitty country where you maybe didn't have to have insurance) I'm pretty sure it serves as a good example that that was an idea that was dumb as fuck as this single event essentially tanked the country's economy for years or decades. I'm not sure what exactly your point is in this case except showing that there are some underdeveloped countries where you don't have to make sure your shit gets cleaned up after you and if it really hits the fan you take down the whole shithole with you. I'm not sure if that's how you want industries to operate where you live and I'm also not sure of that's your idea how nuclear plants should be operated. But, and that's my point, that's how they fucking are. Every single one of them.
The derailed train I don't get at all. There's a whole chapter on that page that deals with how they spent hundreds of millions on the cleanup and settlements. I'm sure a lot of it is covered by insurance companies. What makes you assume something else?
Your last counter example is sewage being fed into rivers covertly and possibly illegally. Like... Yeah, so? If you're willing to break the law I guess you don't care about insurance either. Still not how companies should be run.
Now that really got me curious. Seriously. It's the first time I ever heard about that, so thanks for the input. However, I couldn't really confirm it. First of all, just a look at the graphs of how energy sources developed...
It's just not there! Even more curiously, Wikipedia writes it differently on another page:
So, that's already much less drastic on its wording and more in line with the data above and my prior understanding of the situation. Still, that makes it weird... So I looked at the source your Wikipedia page cites.
Emphasis mine. But fucking hell...
Did you take a look at that paper? I mean apart from the fact that they put all their figures into the appendix, which makes it extremely annoying to read... Instead of looking at the data how power was actually produced, they just say their data doesn't have that info but they just came up with an algorithm that pulls the information out of its random for-ass and says it was probably coal. Subsequently, they use their made-up data as if those hallucinated junk tables were given facts:
Just look at the graphs that trace the actual production further up in this post... One third more hard coal? It's just not there! So, no, that source doesn't hold up and I really wonder who'd think that such a source should be used in the Wikipedia.
I disagree. Look at the gross electricity production graph. Just install more capacity than required and be done with it. As renewables produce electricity that's cheap as fuck, you can just install three times the capacity you need. Subsidise home and large scale batteries to even out energy usage and install large scale batteries and gas plants to hop in if required. Use the excess energy from your overcapacity to produce hydrogen. Push people and industries into hourly updated tariffs so they have a reason to not use electricity if it's scarce (and thus expensive). There are lot of methods. In Germany, an industry-heavy country, renewables are already delivering more than 60 percent of the electricity, up from essentially nothing thirty years ago, and I haven't heard a good argument why this couldn't be increased further. We have the alternatives and they are right here, right now, and they work.
— some pro nuclear guy