As everyone is praising Germany with good weather and temporarily increased use of renewables, the same people rarely notice that France *also* has renewable and combined with nuclear their energy sectors is extremely low-carbon (30 gCO2eq/kWh) - Germany never goes below 150.
Except that there is no nuclear power plant in France or anywhere in Europe built in seismic zone with potential for a 14 m high tsunami tide, which makes likelihood of such disaster zero.
@kravietz Fukushima was failed planning. Chernobyl was an operator error. I'm sure we can come up with several other things that can go wrong with nuclear reactors, but i don't want to be near when they happen.
Nobody wants, except you're living in the world full of risks which you need to balance.
Now, there's now ~400 nuclear reactors operating globally. Two 2nd generation reactors have failed catastrophically, which caused death of ~200 people over the last 70 years.
A single Banqiao dam failure in China in 70's killed 230'000 people, yet we consider hydro power to be "clean".
Coal power is causing thousands of deaths each year, yet Germany has just connected Datteln 4 to the grid.
@kravietz at no point did i argue for building coal power plants. i just said the cost calculation for nuclear plants often omits externalized costs.
Not a single power plant calculation today would even dare to omit any external costs because it would be eaten alive by environmental activists.
Well, maybe with the exception for fossil gas which is currently accepted as a viable alternative by EU Greens and Greenpeace. And suddenly they forget about all the external costs of extraction of fossil gas, Deepwater Horizon, radon gas contained in fossil gas... is suddenly all green and clean.
i don't know where you're getting your info about greenpeace and environmentalists from, but i don't think they are fine with fossil gas...
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/issues/natural-gas/
However, there are concepts that suggest synthesizing hydrogen or methane as a means to temporarily store superflous wind energy in the existing gas network, in order to mitigate the volatility of that energy source.
They are *more* fine with fossil gas than with nuclear, in spite of the scientific evidence and IPCC saying otherwise.
"Austrian Green MEP: Gas is a better transition alternative to coal than nuclear"
The fact that Germany has build a whole shitload of pipelines from Russia and is just finishing another one, and Schroeder works at Gazprom, is a total coincidence of course...
@kravietz gas has one advantage over nuclear, and that is that you can quickly control its power output depending on demand and the rest of suppliers (the other technology that can do that is hydro). Synthetic gas is CO2 neutral, so that is an argument to keep them around for a bit (but not switched on at all times).
This is another fat lie of the Greens - in modern nuclear power plants you can control output as matter of minutes, just as in gas plants. There's no difference.
(dude, i'd really appreciate if you'd turn down the language a bit, "fat lie" etc)
gas plants are faster, see load gradient in the table
https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&nv=1&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lastfolgebetrieb
Have you actually read the article you linked?
@kravietz yes, it says that the current german nuclear plants have been designed to be more flexible, but if you look at the power gradient table, you can see that gas and pumps are faster.
What I see it says is:
Gas - 20% per minute
PWR - 10% per minute
Hydro - 200% per minute
Except you can't build more hydro anywhere in Europe, can you?
@kravietz yes, and 20% > 10%.
(it should be noted that the hydro one in the table is pumped storage)
An important part of energiewende is also the increasing interconnection of the german and European power grid, in order to decrease the influence of sudden changes in supply. (unfortunately people are currently protesting that because they think power lines will look bad in the landscape or something)
Yes, they are also protesting against new find farms in Bayern. Which is kind of understandable, if you look at how much space they occupy.
I live in south of UK and I there's one of the largest off-shore wind farms nearby - Rampion, 116 towers, 400 MW in total, occupying 70 km2 (!).
Also nearby is Dungeness nuclear power plant which occupies maybe 1 km2 and has nominal output of 600 MW.
And Dungeness operates at full power 95% of the time, while Rampion - only 40% on average.
There's a nice picture that essentially shows "how much space we would need to occupy on the sea if we wanted to replace all power with wind" in UK... This is purely conceptual, but it demonstrates how delusional is anyone who claims "we can get 100% from wind".
@kravietz is there anyone (relevant) in the UK arguing for 100% wind? That would be also be unreliable due to the UK being smaller than atlantic weather systems.
This is why I highlighted it's "purely conceptual", but the same power density applies to solar. Both wind and solar are great, where you can build them, but you still need non-intermittent source. If you care about CO2 you go with nuclear, if you don't you go with fossil gas (case of Germany) or coal (case of Poland).
Also I appreciate very much that you don't mention battery storage... Because this argument is being raised a lot in such disputes.
Also I need to sleep a bit now but will respond to anything you write tomorrow.
Also, have you seen the recent "Planet of Humans" movie by Gibbs and Moore?
No, I'm not going to use their arguments against wind and solar because - as many critics have noted - they talk about the state of the technology as it was 20 years ago, and always use "worst case scenario" (like dunkelflaute).
Unfortunately, this is *exactly* what the Greens were doing always when talking about nuclear power. Always talk about 70's reactors and "worst case scenarios".
@kravietz i have not seen the movie
You should see it, even to just make your mind about it.
@kravietz Schröder (and his "green" Minister for the environment) aren't particularily well-liked by environmentalists either... These pipelines also worsened relations between germany and several eastern EU countries.
As I explained before, German government - including Schroeder - is just trying to live between a complete utopia of technically illiterate people who just want "no atom" and the same people who want 24/7 electricity and employment and all the civilization they enjoy today. This is precisely why they increase fossil gas imports.
Fossil gas is perceived as "clean and safe" which is perhaps the largest irony of 2020 granted disasters such as Deepwater Horizon, enormous gas leaks in Siberia and the fact methane is much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. But again, this is 100% marketing and you can see all the large fossil producers, including BP, Shell, Exxon and Gazprom selling this picture.
@kravietz now i'm pretty sure that *that* slide does not support your "environmentalists like gas" argument :D
> synthesizing hydrogen
Yes, the largest existing prototype power-to-gas installations are like 1 MW and they are, well, prototype. This may, or may not work in 10 years.
For example, 10 years ago Greens were telling exactly the same about DESERTEC, a project to build a huge solar farm on Sahara. It never happened.
So if you say you want to close all nuclear reactors in Germany by 2022 and then increase CO2 emissions and increase fossil gas and coal burning because this makes you "safe"... this is an excellent example of the most uninformed and anti-scientific risk management you can imagine.
Regarding mining, you are certainly aware that any modern renewable energy technology (solar panels, wind turbines, batteries) requires vast amounts of rare earth metals which are... mined. And since they co-exist with radioactive elements such as uranium, thorium, radium, they result in radioactive mining waste too.
@kravietz solar panels are made of silicon, the second most common element in the earth's crust.
As for rare earths, it's not like we wouldn't need them if we built more nuclear plants instead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element#Uses
BTW this is from an ad by a mining company who is boasting that their industry is making solar panels possible - what an irony 😂
Now, you can certainly compare material inputs into various energy sources and this is being done all the time...
@kravietz there are no rare earths in that plot
But since we're now most concerned with CO2 emissions, it makes sense to compare the energy sector emissions of various countries. Germany for example is boasting all the time about #Energiewende yet it emits on average 5x more CO2 than France... yet it's bullying France to abandon #nuclear
@kravietz i'm not saying that our (germany's) government doing a particulary great job at the energiewende (cutting subsidies for renewables while creating monetary incentives for buying new cars).
German government is only making one mistake which is bowing to the blackmail of Greens, who are ideologically biased, anti-scientific and completely clueless about engineering. As result they are hurting the environment and climate to the same extent as climate deniers. This applies just as well to nuclear power, which is the only zero-emission *and* stable energy source available today, and to genetic engineering, which reduces land usage *and* herbicide usage.
@kravietz while i agree that the issues you mentioned exist in the green party to some degree, it's worth mentioning that they are neither currently in power, nor ok with the government's overall policies on the matter.
They have enough power to lobby against and kill any project that is not compliant with their worldview.
This is precisely why the policy of German government is so inconsistent. The country needs 24/7 power. But they have to shut down they only zero-emissions *and* stable power source and aren't allowed to build new ones.
So they invest in fossil gas and coal, which are at least reluctantly accepted by the Greens.
You want a good example of decarbonization? Here you go:
@kravietz yes, and now they are replacing the nuclear plants with safer and cleaner alternatives.
You mean French? No, they keep nuclear as their base load and *add* more wind and solar.
Which is precisely why on good weather days - when Germany is boasting about 150 gCOeq/kWh - France achieves 30 gCOeq/kWh.
But on bad days of dunkelflaute Germany goes well above 300, while France or Sweden remain at 60.
Once again, this graph says it all.
> The government has also announced to bring down the nuclear power generation to 50% of the net generation by 2035. The plan is to decommission around 14 nuclear reactors by 2035 and fill the gap by renewable energy sources.
Absolutely, because nuclear *fission* is going to be eventually decommissioned when nuclear fusion goes into production. Not incidentally, the first large fusion reactor ITER is scheduled to go "first plasma' in France in 2025 and first production (DEMO) goes live by 2030.
Obviously, Greenpeace is protesting against nuclear fusion too - they say it's "unrealistic". Except it's way more realistic than hydrogen or power-to-gas.
@kravietz oh i don't have anything against fusion research, i implicitly assumed we were talking about fission because that's the one everyone is using at the moment (and what you're arguing for if you present today's France as a role model)
But betting on fusion turning out to be ready within the necessary time frame is a risky bet as well.
> betting on fusion turning out to be ready
Sure, let's instead bet on hydrogen technology that is not even close to ITER in terms of technological readiness.
Again, if you don't understand why German grid is installing more gas power, this is exactly the reason. They've been terrorised not to use the only zero-emissions stable source, so they use the closest one.
List of planned gas plants in Germany - what exactly are you trying to say here?
@kravietz the part above the table says that many projects are currently stalled because it's not very profitable to run a gas power plant.
So what you are trying to say is that even though Germany is consistently increasing gas imports, building a second Nord Stream pipeline and has like 10 new gas power plants in construction, it al doesn't make any sense because an unsourced paragraph in article heading says so? I would definitely look for a more reliable source.
german federal environmental agency
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/1410/publikationen/2017-05-22_climate-change_15-2017_strommix.pdf
page 20
or the more recent one on wikipedia
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiemix#/media/Datei:Energiemix_Deutschland.svg
(this one somewhat incorrectly includes waste as a renewable, but the share is very low (light green bar))
Ok, you're right, gas has increased, but coal went down by more.
You need rare-earth metals for any modern engineering today, starting from computers and mobile phones. This is engineering. And engineering is sometimes dirty, we just need to make sure it's only as dirty as necessary.
The problem is that Greens create a black-and-white utopia where any amount of radioactivity is totally deadly and solar panels are totally clean and nice.
And everyone is very surprised to find out that oh, solar panels are also "made with dirt"!
@kravietz i don't see how that supports your original argument
> somewhat unsolved problem of waste disposal
This is the whole high-level nuclear waste for the last 50 years of Swiss nuclear industry. There's a guy standing in the middle. How is that "unsolved" exactly?
@kravietz guaranteeing that these containers and that building remain intact for the next few thousand years. Also, this is the solution that germany came up with:
https://www.ksta.de/image/6481462/2x1/940/470/afc996b52c7b1dd73a877e0a21042a6e/lv/14826c00cddd75ff-jpg.jpg
"Few thousands"? Do you even realize that 95% of used nuclear fuel is being recycled back into nuclear fuel, and what is left is absolutely tiny amounts? And these tiny amounts lose 95% of their radiotoxicity after just 100 years? This is simple physics, but Greenpeace will never tell you that.
@kravietz Solar and wind are no substitute for nuclear.
They can and should work together, yes, but they nowhere near substitute one another.
@kravietz
such calculation often omit the externalized costs of nuclear energy. A study by the French government concluded that a Fukushima style disaster would cost them €430bn, which is more than plant operators and insurance companies can pay, meaning the state will have to cover it.
https://fr.reuters.com/article/topNews/idFRPAE91601Q20130207
The ecological/social/health impacts of uranium mining and the somewhat unsolved problem of waste disposal have to be considered as well.
http://www.afrol.com/articles/36725