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.
@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.
> 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.
