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

@guenther

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.

@guenther

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.

@guenther

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.

@kravietz

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.

@guenther

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"

https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/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).

@guenther

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.

@kravietz

(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

@guenther

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.

@guenther

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)

@guenther

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".