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.
@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
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.
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.
@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.