this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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You don't need to plan "1000's of years into the future." Why does Nuclear require a multi-generational plan on a scale that no civilization has ever attained, but burning fossil fuels which will kill most of us within a few generations doesn't? It's a distraction, the solution to nuclear waste was solved in the 50's and the reality is that dangerous nuclear waste is useful and should be recycled, and the low-order nuclear waste isn't dangerous for anymore then a century at most, and even then it's only if you consume it.
Ok, but in 2022 alone Germany emitted 746 000 000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. I'll take the 10.500 of easily containable waste over 60 years, please. In fact, let's do 5x that. Or even 10x.
I don't want maximise nuclear waste, I want to minimise carbon emissions.
Germany decided to minimise nuclear waste, and while doing that they're having to fire up fossil fuel powerplants. Does that sound right to you?
https://strom-report.com/strom/
Kind of says the opposite, doesn't it?
No, it really does not. That compares power generation mix, not total capacity, over the same periods of different years, which you can't interpret in a vacuum. Look at the neighbouring countries' data so you can normalise the data and analyse it properly. It may very well be that total power generation in the period they're comparing is down overall due to a warmer winter. So it stands to reason that so would fossil fuels.
If you want to interpret it properly, we can go over it, but it won't tell you much about what we're talking about. The matter is that while we're in a fullblown climate crisis, and what we're doing is insufficient, they reopened coal plants:
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-reactivates-coal-fired-power-plant-to-save-gas/a-62893497
And are planning to expand gas generation capacity: https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/germany-plans-build-25-gw-new-gas-fired-capacity-2030.html
And none of it would be necessary had they not closed their very well performing NPPs.
We need to be doing everything we can to decarbonise, and I honestly don't understand why we keep having this 60 year old discussion, the same as the previous generations that have led us to this point. It really only serves so that fossil fuel magnates can keep lining their pockets as the world burns. Somehow they've convinced people that nuclear is competition for renewables instead of complementary, it's really incredible to me.
Your first link is almost one year old. They did indeed prepare for a worst case, which didn't occur after all. Coal and gas consumption (total, not just percentage wise) did not go up, but down instead.
Yes, a mild winter helped. Unfortunately, winters are getting warmer and warmer, and the last one was no exception there.
So why is your country's emissions per capita more than 50% higher than France's (from here), despite a much higher renewables percentage in the power mix? Might it have something to do with how much more nuclear they have?
Looking through your post history, we seem to be aligned in advocating for decarbonisation. If you really want to reach zero emissions as soon as possible, don't you think we should be exploring every carbon free avenue, and shutting down every single fossil fuel power plant?
Don't fall for your government's justifications, or fearmongering around nuclear. If we want to decarbonise the grid, we need it to complement renewables and fill the roles that renewables can't by themselves. The longer we take to realise that, the longer we'll keep burning greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
I'm not paying €79/month to review the whole statistics, but you know perfectly well that France started from a much lower number. They already had nuclear when we started to roll out renewables on a large scale. Are you by any chance familiar with the term "head start"?
But decisions from 40 years ago are irrelevant for decisions today. Spilled milk.
Sure. But nuclear is probably not the answer: we don't have those decades left it takes to build hundreds of new plants. Not to mention the astronomical cost. The ship had sailed 30 years ago.
Edit: the last 3 nuclear plants we shut down this year had a combined capacity of around 4 GW. In 2022 we installed over 7 GW of solar and about 2.5 GW of wind capacity (this year it will probably significantly more)
We don't need hundreds of new plants. France only has around 50 and it's more than enough. It's also feasible to retrofit existing coal plants with nuclear reactors, for example.
30 years ago it was the same argument. "It takes too long, we needed to have started earlier". Well, here we are now. Let's not have kids 30 years from now saying the same thing.
France regularly imports (renewable) electricity from Germany when they have to shut down some of their reactors due to cooling problems in summer. So 50 are not enough. For a smaller economy.
Every country imports electricity from their neighbours. Germany also imports from France. That's how an interconnected power grid works.
Yes, but for decades Germany has been a net exporter. Which is good for our economy.
Well, so has France. And at a larger percentage. While emitting disproportionately less carbon, which, again, is the whole point of this conversation. I'd rather not sacrifice climate for the sake of economy. Especially because the economy will suffer a lot more if we don't get emissions under control.
You can't just ignore the cost. Why spend €100 on nuclear, when you can generate 3 times as much electricity using wind, with the same amount?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
Because they fill different roles in the power grid? They don't replace each other. Haven't you been reading what I've been saying all this time or what? Nuclear works WITH renewables. It's fossil fuels we need to phase out, and nuclear can fill their role when renewables can't.
I have been reading what you wrote, but I don't consider your "renewables can't" a valid point. They can.
But I don't think we will ever be able to convince each other. Can we agree on that?
In many places, a lot of the time, they can. But not everywhere, all of the time.
The problem is that if even fellow environmentalists like yourself keep thinking of nuclear like a boogeyman, or just not knowing how a power grid works, then we stand no hope of decarbonising power generation. Did you know fossil fuel use is growing worldwide in electricity generation while nuclear is stagnating? The way to decrease that that brown area is by increasing all the other colours in similar proportion. There are circumstances where a fully renewable grid is possible, but those conditions aren't the same everywhere, and those niches will continue to be filled by fossil fuels until we stop being afraid of the much better alternative. The fact is countries with higher percentages of nuclear in their power mix have much lower emissions per GDP per capita than their neighbours. So I may not be able to convince you, but I'm going to keep trying to educate anyway.
Tell me, then, how can you have a stable grid with renewables alone in places where (or when) pumped hydro isn't feasible or can't provide enough power by itself? Or in countries prone to lengthy droughts, like my own? I'm not asking this to argue, but because our disagreement may come from a misunderstanding of the base working principles of the power grid.
It's called nuclear reprocessing and it was banned as a compromise between the USSR and the USA because it can also be used to make weapons. The USSR is gone now, and any country that wants to do it is more then welcome to withdraw from the nuclear reprocessing treaty. They can do it unilaterally without any risk at all and that takes care of their existing and future high-order nuclear waste in one fell-swoop.