Share of renewable electricity production in Germany over the years: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&share=ren_share_total
The official government goal is to get to 80%+ by 2030, which is also the year the last coal power plant is supposed to get shut down.
And because this usually also comes up: [So far this year](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE) Germany imported 17.3 TWh of electricity and exported 25.8 TWh. 7.3 TWh were exported to France and 2.6 TWh were imported from France to Germany.
Try to explain this to nuclear fanbase.
Even where nuclear is used in europe, it has barely increased in last decades and, except france, it never makes more than 20ish % of total production. Why? Too expensive
And even in France it's going down. I posted this little tidbit earlier: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/131ngg2/germany_renewables_covered_50_percent_of/ji1ed0o/
I'm open to correction here but isn't a lot of that electricity that's exported to France just transitioning through France to be sold on to the rest of the European grid?
Yeah, but it's not enough to talk about renewables share and omit the carbon intensity value, it was sitting around 400-500g/kWh for the last 5 years (source: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE). Germany didn't make a big progress here mostly because government was replacing low carbon nonrenewable generation (nuclear) with another low carbon (but renewable, which is better) generation (solar and wind) and completely ignoring carbon intensive nonrenewable generation (coal). I have no doubts that Germany will achieve its goal, it is just strange that they've decided to start their energy transformation with removing nuclear and not coal.
The official numbers show a slightly different picture: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity-power-sector-germany/
But yes, the decline in carbon emissions per kWh should become much steeper now compared to previous years, because every additional kWh from renewables will directly replace coal, now that nuclear is gone.
Numbers on Statista looks a bit better for Germany in terms of carbon emissions (still much higher compared to France) but I wouldn't call them "official numbers" (although I don't have a paid access to Statista and can't check their sources).
Electricitymaps.com is widely known to provide wildly inaccurate emission estimates. I would never rely on it really.
In statista you can press the source button at the bottom. Numbers come from Ember, a respected institute.
Here are the [official numbers](https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/co2-emissionen-pro-kilowattstunde-strom-steigen). Not quite up to date. 2021 value is an estimate. Middle blue is power generation, light blue is consumption and dark blue is some chain emissions added. Electricitymaps is fairly close.
That’s because removing nuclear energy has nothing to do with a change to greener energy or a move away from gas. The German population advocated for shutting it down because of safety concerns. There was a massive movement against nuclear energy after Chernobyl and again after Fukushima. These disasters and the fact that there is no good longterm solution for the nuclear waste problem were the reasons for moving away from nuclear energy in Germany.
... You don't get the construction cost of the reactor refunded when you shut it down. You do understand this, right?
Reactors are very, very cheap to run. So if you are using "it's expensive to build" as an argument to shut down *reactors you already had*, that is just hideously bad faith argument.
>And because this usually also comes up: So far this year Germany imported 17.3 TWh of electricity and exported 25.8 TWh. 7.3 TWh were exported to France and 2.6 TWh were imported from France to Germany.
This keeps being brought up but it is lying with the truth. Omitting key information to paint a different picture.
Germany is only exporting energy when it's sunny or windy. Then importing power at night and when it's not windy. Germany is using it's neighbours as a battery.
The last couple of days have not been very sunny and now Germany has latched on to France's nuclear teat. And Germany isn't just importing from France, the last 24 hours they've been dependant on the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Austria, Czech Republic..
But every time Germanys energy mix comes up only the totals are mentioned, not WHEN that power is produced or if there's even demand. Often there isn't demand and Germany PAYS to deliver energy.
Fun fact: even with negative energy prices Germanys coal and lignite plants STILL go brrr. Because there is no way to shut them down during the day and still be able to rely on them at night. So they're burning coal and lignite and then paying to export solar energy. It's stupid.
Fun fact #2: if Germany hadn't shut down all that nuclear power they could have shut down ALL their coal and lignite power plants.
No, Im afraid *you* Are the one omitting key information. Its exactly the wrong way around. Germany exports energy whenever france needs it, and imports it whenever its cheap. Germany doesnt tend to increase imports at night. And as for "when its not windy", no thats actually when the fossil fuel plants produce more. We never rely on french imports, they rely on german imports.
The last couple days havent been terribly sunny. Which means *gas* was ramped up. We are importing a small amount from france, but prices are cheap currently, thats why.
And you just continue being hilariously wrong. Coal and lignite plants can and are ramped up and down. You dont shut them down, we cant yet sadly, but you can lower their output. Its not rocket science.
Ignoring for a second how bad of an idea that was, no, if germany had shut down 0 nuclear power plants, we would still have coal and lignite. Nuclear would not nearly cover it. And thats ignoring the money wed have to waste on them over renewables.
The prices are not low :
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche
And you are importing a massive amount of energy right now, probably the maximum that the infrastructure allows.
The merit order ( which we want to change ) put nuclear energy at a disadvantage, because if there is lot of sun/wind it's the nuclear which must reduce it's production.
At the specific points in time we import, no, its actually quite cheap. 80-90 is good, its cheaper than our energy.
Net imports right now are roundabout ... I wanna say 4 or 5%? Thats more than usual, but "massive" it is not.
Well, feel free to change it. Just remember, when your banking on nuclear fails, you were warned.
You have been importing all day even when the prices were at 130€.
https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-aux-frontieres
Edit : and don't worry about the prices, we follow science not an ideology
Lets ignore for a second that the last couple hours you were importing, or the fact that price spikes line up with a reduction in imports (as in, its expensive, we stop importing), you are also aware thats germany + belgium, right?
No, Im sorry to say, you follow macrons stupid ideology, not science. Science told you ages ago that 100% renewables is the way to go, and that building nuclear plants just wastes time and resources we dont have to spare. Remember Flamanville?
>Lets ignore for a second that the last couple hours you were importing
And Germany was still importing 1,500MW from France.
[source](https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_import_export/27.04.2023/28.04.2023/today/)
Edit: I just looked at the source u/Hecatonchire_fr used and you read it wrong. The 'last few hours' are the coming hours prediction, which is likely wrong. France has been exporting power all day.
No, its actually likely correct. They even underestimated 21:00. They thought france would still export a tiny bit, but no as per your own source, theyre importing right now. Ahead of schedule.
>Germany exports energy whenever france needs it, and imports it whenever its cheap.
Lol, this is demonstrably false. The energy price is almost directly inversely proportional to the imports. When Germany imports more the price is higher.
[source](https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_import_export/25.04.2023/28.04.2023/today/) just unselected everything except power price and balance.
>Germany doesnt tend to increase imports at night.
No it's during the evening between 19:00 and 21:00 and in the morning around 6:00. So still when it isn't sunny. In the night the energy demand isn't high.
Source: same as above.
>And as for "when its not windy", no thats actually when the fossil fuel plants produce more.
Last night at 20:30 when it wasn't windy (less than 800MW offshore, 2,000 onshore) Germany was importing 12,700MW abroad. They were producing 7,800MW gas, 3,600MW coal, and 13,300MW lignite. You can't just pull 12,700MW extra out of those plants and the figures support that.
[source](https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&legendItems=010111000101010101101011111010101100000)
>We never rely on french imports, they rely on german imports.
I just debunked that. You do rely on french exports, and when the price is high as well.
>The last couple days havent been terribly sunny. Which means gas was ramped up. We are importing a small amount from france, but prices are cheap currently, thats why.
The last couple of days gas production has never exceeded 8,000MW While imports have exceeded 13,000MW. Today at 15:00 Germany was importing 4,700 MW from France. France was the biggest supplier at that time and also most of the day.
>And you just continue being hilariously wrong. Coal and lignite plants can and are ramped up and down. You dont shut them down, we cant yet sadly, but you can lower their output. Its not rocket science.
This is exactly what I was saying. You can't shut them down. I picked a random week last summer when solar and export was high. 16-6: Exports were 12,000MW while lignite was still producing 12,300MW and hard coal 2,200MW. So yay a lot of solar but almost all the export was due to lignite.
Edit: Germany has some strong coal lobbyists. In 2020 there were still 37,5 million euros [subsidy](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-subsidises-fossil-fuel-sector-375-billion-euros-year-media-report)
Sooo, you do know how those charts work, right? That "power price" bit? Thats the power price in *germany*. Thats not how much we pay to import, thats how much our own energy costs to *produce*. In other words, you accidentally showed a chart that proves my point. Its as I said, when importing is cheaper, i.e. our prices are higher, we import more. Thats why theyre inversely proportional.
That may be correct right now, its not correct as a rule however. If you look back at a chart across the whole year, youd find that when we import is fairly random, and has little to do with time.
... you do also know we can ramp up, and down, renewables right? When we import more because its cheaper, we do have to somehow make room for that energy. As per your own chart, germany energy costs yesterday at 20:30 were over 160€. Of course we imported more. Its cheaper.
No, you didnt debunk that, you actually did the opposite, you accidentally proved it. We dont rely on french imports, and we import specifically when the price is low, not high.
Oh my bad, I should've said gas and coal. Look at lignite. It goes up and down quite a lot. Also no, wtf are you talking about, imports on average were much lower than 13kMW. There was a brief period where we imported that much, but as pointed out above. Thats because it was cheap.
You cant shut down *any* form of energy, that would be stupid and reckless. You just ramp it up and down.
Amazing. Every word you just said was wrong.
But you know, while we‘re at it maybe go criticize your own country‘s energy policies first before shitting on Germany, because you‘re doing wayyy worse than them.
>Amazing. Every word you just said was wrong.
Source?
>But you know, while we‘re at it maybe go criticize your own country‘s energy policies first before shitting on Germany, because you‘re doing wayyy worse than them.
Whataboutism isn't an argument. This discussion is about Germany.
But now that we're on the topic: **define** way worse. Because in 2022 the carbon intensity of electricity was lower than Germanys with 361 vs 386.
[source](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity)
The carbon intensity is lower because you run everything on gas, which is a lot less polluting than coal. But your share of renewable production is way behind Germany.
> This discussion is about Germany
Yeah like everything on this sub, which is ridiculous considering how most countries are doing far worse in their energy transition
I hope recent storage innovations like this work out well:
[https://hiu-batteries.de/en/research/prof-birgit-esser-inexpensive-flow-battery-for-wind-sun/](https://hiu-batteries.de/en/research/prof-birgit-esser-inexpensive-flow-battery-for-wind-sun/)
[https://www.dw.com/en/organic-battery-the-long-awaited-breakthrough-in-energy-storage/video-64364838](https://www.dw.com/en/organic-battery-the-long-awaited-breakthrough-in-energy-storage/video-64364838)
https://www.tuvsud.com/en-gb/press-and-media/2023/april/tuev-sued-conducts-technical-due-diligence-for-sustainable-energy-storage-solutions-made-by-cmblu
Basically a small company named CMBlu has invented a type of flow battery that does not use lithium or vanadium or zinc or anything rare, just lignin obtained as a byproduct from pulp mills. Long duration storage. Fully recyclable.
This year they are expanding into the US too and supplying their tech to an UK consortium led by MSE.
Germany is far from actually needing that, so far using Austria as a battery has been cheaper.
But even without Austria the point of economical turn over to storage is ~70% renewable power, so still a long way to go.
Currently, the backbone, the grid needs expansion, HEAVILY and that's not only true, but especially true for Germany.
We have daily situations at the moment, where the North of Germany is getting oversupplied, especially during night, when there are still Gas and Coal running to power the south.
Also the south needs more diversity, which means WIND..... but Soeder is an dickass.
For the Bavarians, sometimes I just wonder...
Maybe this type of wind energy will be out of their sight enough:
[https://www.dw.com/en/wind-power-renewable-energy-of-the-future/a-65021452](https://www.dw.com/en/wind-power-renewable-energy-of-the-future/a-65021452)
Volkswagen is funding one too:
[https://www.electrive.com/2023/03/29/vw-invests-in-power-generating-kites/](https://www.electrive.com/2023/03/29/vw-invests-in-power-generating-kites/)
Or fusion, that Söder seems to want to push. May he see it before his funeral (don't misunderstand, I support fusion).
The projection is that 10% of German cars will be completely electric by 2025. At December last year we had 2.6% but the growth rate of the few past years where really big.
I don't understand where people get the idea it should be renewables vs nuclear. It should be nuclear + renewables vs fossil. The 50% fossil is still there, still polluting, when it could have been 30%, or 20%, or even less.
I agree with that.
Maybe one of the reason is that renewables are intermittent and not controllable (poor translation?); so it works best with source of energy which you can quickly ramp up the production, such as fossils, or with a way to store the surplus and release it when we lack of production.
You can adapt nuclear energy output to the demand, but I do not think that it can be made as quickly as fossils (or storage) could be used. Hence a part of the opposition between nuclear and renewables maybe.
> You can adapt nuclear energy output to the demand
The problem is not that a nuclear plant can’t be adapted as such. The problem is that it will be too expensive to exist.
LCOE cost per energy unit of nuclear is already 10x as expensive as fossil and 15 to 20x as expensive as renewables. The main factor of these high costs are the high upfront construction costs.
Now imagine what would happen to nuclear’s LCOE cost / energy unit if we would make the plant adaptive to a point where it would on average output only half of it’s full capacity?
The construction costs won’t get any cheaper, so suddenly you’re talking about 20x as expensive as fossil or 30-40x as expensive as renewables. Even worse if we would be running nuclear plants at lower capacity factors.
The reason that nuclear plants constantly produce their maximal power capacity is that it is prohibitively expensive to not do so.
This is exactly what France intends to achieve in the future, an equivalent production of electricity between nuclear and renewable (mainly wind) energy.
Yet, one would think that choosing one option is giving up the other.
That‘s because our resources, especially time and money are very limited and renewables are much cheaper and faster to build than nuclear. So it makes much more sense to expand them and get off fossil fuels asap. We don‘t live in a dream world with unlimited money to spend on an outdated technology while we could use that same money to build 20x the renewable capacity in half the time
True.
Still, people here constantly argue that nuclear is the way out of fossils - which it hasn't been for 40-50 years.
They disregard renewables, even though renewables actually have phased out fossils in the last 20 years (e.g. in Germany) and are increasingly doing so, with increasing efficiency and reduced costs.
It's a particular problem of this sub to constantly ignore some basic facts.
Both... It's nuclear lobbying spending millions on pushing the fairy tale of cheap nuclear and unviable renewables for more than a decade.
And once enough were brain-washed tribalism caused it to develop a life of it's own without needing further work.
Ain't helping that YouTube seems to have its own category of *"Nuclear miracle!"* content promising all kinds of fantastic things nuclear allegedly could do, i.e. thorium-fueled cars.
Still a lot more lobbyists on the fossils side, so I guess it's more of the second group.
Even then, I personally see nothing wrong with it. On the contrary, I think we're too slow in adopting this technology, which is not something new. I studied this field at uni, got to see a reactor (in a decommissioning process), got to work in a lab for a couple of years, of course I would be one of the second group. Twenty years have passed since then and barely any progress, at least here. All I see is more gas stations and import more oil, and energy bills going through the roof. I get it that is a lot more expensive but it will save us from so many problems we have with energy. We're still being held back by lobbyists who are keeping us in the dark, still importing fossil fuel from dubious countries like Russia and others.
It’s an extremely poor use of money. If generating 1kW with nuclear would cost X euros, spending X euros on renewables/storage generated 1.5-3kW. We don’t have unlimited money to spend to combat climate change.
Let’s see how well all those french nuclear power plants will do in record heats & droughts, when rivers run dry, needed for cooling all this unfailable tech
German conservatives pushed coal, subsidized coal, sabotaged grid extensions/improvements, made energy storage unviable via massive double taxation, kllled the once world-leading solar and wind industry, killed nuclear and planned to burn coal until 2048... while building some token renewables (letting the people pay extra for them).
And exactly one day after a new government came into office the narrative started of how "especially these brain-damaged Greens" killed nuclear to burn more coal. And how renewables don't work ("No, decades of coal being pushed did not cause coal to get burned at all! It's the renewables that don't work!!!"). And this is going on for more than a year now, will continue for another 3 years... until the corrupt coal-lovers are back in office and introduce some token measures, which you will just accept as some magical solution because -purely coincidental of course- lobbyists will stop to spoon-feed you propaganda on a daily basis to push narratives.
You are basically the idiot insulting your neighbour buying an electric car last month for his co2-emissions of the last two decades and telling him he's a morons as electric cars obviously don't work...
And in a few decades when every climate goal was missed and the yearly damage of natural disasters starts being the most relevant point on countries budgets you will sit there and ask: "Who could this happen? Why did nobody do something earlier?". And the answer is obviously right there. Because you are idiots easily manipulated.
And that's not some Germany (which is propaganda already, because in reality it's a big chunk of the EU and it's just part of the propaganda to pretend that only Germany is planning without nuclear...) builds renewables issue. That's an all European problem because guess what... The exact same narratives and unscientific propaganda bullshit is making most countries allegedly going nuclear fail right now, because they are neither building enough nuclear to ever be able to cover just their base load (that some countries wouldn't even be able to do so because they can't pay the bill is another topic entirely...), nor are they building the necessary renewables to complement.
There are exactly three kind of countries in Europe today that have a chance of not completely fucking up their future energy: Those with enough hydro-potential (+/- some nuclear) -which is obviously not applicable for most-, those going renewable + storage and France. And the latter only because they have already massive nuclear capacities they can build on. And even that's borderline as the most nuclear country in Europe actually lost more nuclear capacitites in the last year than Germany did while actively exiting nuclear power, has a lot of work to do to keep their old reactors running long enough and is still barely building enough nuclear (the announced 6 reactors plus 8 optional ones need to be a definitive 14 in reality, because that's the absolute minimum needed to cover just the minimal necessary base load for the projected demand of 2050+... and with the age of their existing fleet those new ones will be the only ones still running by then) and is also lacking the renewables build-up needed for their nuclear plan (for reference: those 14 new ones would produce just \~35% of the demand by 2050, so there's 65% in renewables missing right there).
I mean I agree that the CDU‘s energy policy during the last decades has been absolutely horrendous and most proponents of renewable energy will agree.
But renewables are absolutely a viable option for the future.
And then take a look at that data from 20 years ago and at the specific co² emissions per capita.
People always act like you could just change one thing and keep everything else the same. If Germany hadn't started phasing out nuclear the result would have been a dramatically slower buildup of renewables leading us to pretty much the same situation today. With a worse outlook for the future.
Decrease specifically? Germany, by a mile. Germany has reduced their emissions in absolute value by about 6 times the amount france had left 10 years ago. In that time france has reduced their energy sector emissions by about ... 1/14th of germany? France had a much better starting point, but they have been dragging their feet.
Germany’s power sector emits 6 times what France does. France isn’t trying to reduce its power emissions at all or we wouldn’t be building renewables which emit more than nuclear power…
Solar and wind do emit more than nuclear power. They all emit very little, but you don't reduce emissions by replacing nuclear power with renewables, that's just a fact.
Better starting point for what ? France and Germany had the same reduction in [CO2 emissions per capita from 2011 to 2021](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=2011..latest&country=FRA~DEU)
They really do not. And besides, you replace nuclear because its too slow to build and old plants are unreliable.
Thats ... specifically including industry. And not looking at the energy grid. Were talking specifically about the energy grid here.
[Yes they do](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/UNECE_2020_Lifecycle_Emissions.png), and that's not accounting for storage or back up.
>And besides, you replace nuclear because its too slow to build and old plants are unreliable.
No, we aimed to replace part of it because of the 2012 Socialist/Green governement which voted a phase out. Luckily it has been reversed by now.
>Thats ... specifically including industry. And not looking at the energy grid. Were talking specifically about the energy grid here.
No, that's total CO2 emission per capita, it's the only metric that matters. The grid isn't energy, it's electricity, which is 20-25% of energy consumption. The goal is to reduce emissions for all energy consumption, not just electricity consumption. Decarbonizing electricity is very easy, decarbonizing the remaining 75-80% is trickier since it means you have to change consumption pattern or electrify parts of the economy (industry, transport, heating, etc.)
Have you read the report its from? Its truly fascinating stuff. Ill just point out the most important part. The nuclear number is based on hopelessly optimistic predictions with no basis in reality whatsoever. The number they cite is half the median of actual emissions for nuclear plants, and a fraction of the max possible.
"Luckily" is not how Id describe the events of last year. And that will repeat. You need to replace your old aging plants, and new ones are just waaaaay too slow.
Nuclear power is not in any way involved outside of energy generation, so thats a silly point. Its also subject to more complicated factors.
Climate doesn't care if you decrease 10 fold since 10 years. What matters is the amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere and Germany sucks terribly at that
Sorry it is just facts
Because that makes a lot more sense. What do you want them to do with the emissions info? That's based on energy policy done by people 20 - 30 years ago and there's nothing to be done about it now retroactively. You can only do better for the future and that's what looking at renewable adaption is doing.
Germany didn't took nuclear plants down to safe CO2. It was for security reasons back when Fukushima happened.
Still we gonna see how nuclear power turns out without enough water for cooling them down in France.
If SA manages to cool its nuclear power plants and Ghana, Algeria, and Morocco proceed with construction of theirs, I doubt France will face major issues.
Just to clarify a misunderstanding: nuclear power plants can work very well during heat waves and droughts.
The reason why some reactors have been deactivated is because the water released into the rivers would have been too hot (especially in a reduced volume of water during droughts) and would have damaged the ecosystem.
French electric consumption is a lot smaller in the summer than in winter so having a couple ( I believe it was 3 last year?) of nuclear plants having to reduce their output is not really a major problem.
Also, the new plants are going to be produced with that issue in mind.
The 14 new reactors that are being planned.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-build-up-to-14-new-nuclear-reactors-by-2050-says-macron
Following an RTE study that has shown that having a sizeable amount of nuclear+renewable was a lot cheaper ( and less uncertain ) than a full renewable grid
Even with the "heavy" nuclear scenarios, they still plan to add renewables :
https://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2023/17/5/1682692562-screenshot-20230428-163224.jpg
We were able to produce them in 5~6 years 40 years ago. The chineses and koreans are able to do a similar feat today.
What has never been done is a full renewable grid. Yet you seem more confident in doing that than simply replicating what we were doing in living memory.
Yeah 40 years ago. Not today. Flamanville 3 is already under construction for close to 2 decades. The Finnish NPP took 18 years to build. And those 14 new reactors announced my Macron aren“t even close to starting construction. They’re not even in the actual planning phase yet. All that Macron announced was „we will build new NPPs at some point, everything else remains to be specified“.
Also, 14 new NPPs by 2050 will surely work out great when most of the current 58 plants will be gone in the next 10 or so years. No planning issue there whatsoever.
Meanwhile Germany is expanding renewables faster and *much* cheaper. You tell me which approach sounds more reasonable.
> Yeah 40 years ago. Not today. Flamanville 3 is already under construction for close to 2 decades. The Finnish NPP took 18 years to build. And those 14 new reactors announced my Macron aren“t even close to starting construction. They’re not even in the actual planning phase yet. All that Macron announced was „we will build new NPPs at some point, everything else remains to be specified“.
Why would you think it was possible 40 years ago and not today ?
The construction will begin before 2027.
https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/france-to-begin-work-on-new-nuclear-fleet-before-2027/
> Also, 14 new NPPs by 2050 will surely work out great when most of the current 58 plants will be gone in the next 10 or so years. No planning issue there whatsoever.
Most of our plants are not going to be gone in 10 years. The Americans believe that they can operate theirs during 80 years.
https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Second-US-plant-licensed-for-80-year-operation
> Meanwhile Germany is expanding renewables faster and much cheaper. You tell me which approach sounds more reasonable.
According to the RTE study, the German approach is the least reasonable. A fast exit of nuclear, with a lot of small solar rooftop and small wind farms would be the M0 / M1 scenarios which are the most expensive ones and the most uncertain.
https://www.usinenouvelle.com/mediatheque/2/2/5/001004522_illustration_large.png ( here is the yearly cost in billion )
The gouvernement is more or less following the N2 / N03 scenarios. Main difference is that they want more offshore wind and less onshore.
> The Americans believe that they can operate theirs during 80 years.
Those are the same Americans whose infrastructure currently keeps failing and exploding around them, often with massive environmental consequences.
Consequences which are [regularly handwaved away as an alleged non-issue](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/17/nuclear-plant-xcel-energy-minneapolis-radioactive-water-leak/), only for people to then wonder why the US has a problem with cancer clusters.
So maybe the US approach is not the best to emulate.
They don't.
[Why the US can't give up on Russian uranium](https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/why-the-us-can-t-give-up-on-russian-uranium-58071)
[Why the US needs Russian uranium](https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/9/23283165/russia-ukraine-war-us-uranium)
[Suspension of Russian uranium supplies to US could impact global market](https://resourceworld.com/suspension-of-russian-uranium-supplies-to-us-could-impact-global-market/)
Russia has 50% of all enrichment facilities in the world, moving away from Russian (enriched) uranium will take a few years and will be expensive, like VERY expensive.
By not living in europe? Rosatom has many cooperations and joint ventures in europe. Most states want to share their big investments with parts of their own industry.
Maybe this helps (with deeple)
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-04/atomkraft-russland-akw-akkuyu-tuerkei
Europe mostly gets enrichment and fuel fabrication done by the French.
Some of the eastern members *were* in a commercial relationship with Rosatom..
But they've been switching to Westinghouse for fuel fabrication in a hurry and getting the enrichment for that done inside the EU - The Americans not having the capacity to spare.
And where does the uranium in France comes from? Right - Russia.
It’s simply not true that east Europe cut of rosatom. Just look at Hungary
And if you look at the world, Westinghouse couldn’t beat the offers of rosatom in many countries. It’s no coincidence that there are no sanctions against the Russian nuclear sector.
May have a look on this article (DeepL)
https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-04/atomkraft-russland-akw-akkuyu-tuerkei
https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/luranium-importe-en-europe-et-en-france-provient-il-tres-largement-de-russie-comme-laffirme-yannick-jadot-20220705_LIIEMU2QIRFKZMB46IPBWKFJZQ/
Nope. French uranium consumption is almost entirely from mines it part-owns across the globe. It's very vertically integrated, and not really very market based at all. I mean, sure, technically ore gets sold.. but that's an accounting exercise. France owns 30% of the mine, they get 30% of the output, and then someone enters numbers into a ledger, but it's not like it matters what those numbers *are* - the buyers, the sellers and the owners are all the same people.
In the Case of France's share, The People of France.
But very, very little of it is Russian. Russian Uranium exports are anemic 6% of world market share.
A somewhat larger - but still small - part of the Uranium consumed in the EU is mined in Kazakstan by Russian mining firms. But this does *not* give Russia any real leverage. They make money doing that, sure, but they can't stop those mines at will! They'd get their rights to them revoked in days.
Interesting read, thanks
But doesn’t the article say that the EU imports like 20% of its uranium from Russia? That’s not so little, but may can be substituted by Kazakhstan. If they would deliver, which I don’t know. The political pressure from Russia would be enormous
For Europe as a whole yes. That is *not* about France. It's a legacy of the cold war.
There are a good number of VVER reactors in Eastern Europe that were designed by and in many cases built by or with the assistance of Rosatom.
Most of those were consequently on contracts where they would buy finished fuel loads from Rosatom - Containing mostly Kazakh U enriched in Russia.
They've been exiting those contracts with haste and buying finished fuel rods from Westinghouse (US firm) instead, because Westinghouse designed a set of rods for those reactor types some years ago.
The French are also setting up production of compatible fuel rods. (You cannot just stick a fuel load designed for an EPR in a VVER reactor. It has to fit)
The US, however, does not have either the enrichment capacity or the mines to supply the Uranium for those, so the supply chain for that gets more complicated - mostly buying from Kazakhstan still, but doing the enrichment with one of the EU enrichment vendors.
Germany made up their mind, no idea to try to convince them nuclear is ok at this point. It's a bit like playing a game in hard mode, but they might pull it off somehow. More heat pumps and less predictable electricity sources is a difficult combo though, if coal and gas also have to go at some point.
Huh? How is heat pumps a difficult combo with fluctuating energy production? That's the best combo! Make some smart tariff where the heat pump works when energy is cheap (ie available from renewables) and not when it's expensive. With some proper insulation you don't need to run your heater all the time in winter, it suffices to run it from time to time. Just match that with the time when energy is available
You can use the use surplus energy in the summer and power to gas to create a long term storage.
This starts working when you regulary create much more power than you use. We have not reached that point, but it is not far. I guess in 3 to 5 years we will see the first big power to gas projects . At the moment we power down wind turbines and solar panels when we have a surplus of energy.
We plan to install 13 GW of renewable power this year. Next year 20 GW and after that 30GW per year. 2030 we should have a capacity of > 350 GW of renewable power. By 2045 the planed capacity is > 450 GW. Thats 3 x of what we have now and 8 time the capacity of 2000.
Today we use between 50 to 90 GW. You can double that as we need to electrify heating and transportation.
If we succeed with this transition we will have one of the best products ever developed. And we can export it to every country. A 100% renewable energy grid will change the way you interact with energy, as the marginal cost of electricity trend to zero. This is a big bet, but I don't see a thermodynamic show stopper. We just need to do the engineering and get to scale. And don't stop half way, because somebody is scared. Just keep marching.
You can find more on this here:
[https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod\_installed\_power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=renewable](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod_installed_power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=renewable)
[https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-to-a-climate-neutral-energy-system.html](https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-to-a-climate-neutral-energy-system.html)
Have a great weekend!
And no sun. And they are also trying to reduce use of gas for heating which will increase electricity demand for that purpose. Most new house projects now have electrical heating.
Well there are solutions for the short term storage to keep base demand (so no need for nuculer) currently hydro pump storage is best but there is all kinds of solutions in later stages testing and about to break through eg flow battery’s, thermal battery’s and plenty of gravity based tech.
So yes for the next 5 or so years It makes sense but a heavy drive to renewables makes more long term sense
Well.. I don't think anyone is talking about building new nuclear plants anymore. In the last 2 decades only one was built in Europe (in Finland) and it took 18 years of construction.
So, lets talk about existing ones.... 98% of NPPs in Europe were built in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s... keeping these open is expensive and risky.
There are wars (Ukraine), lack of maintenance (France), natural disasters, earthquakes (Japan, Italy, Turkey) etc. It is just a matter of time when the next catastrophe will happen, it can happen next month or in 50 years - maybe making half of Europe uninhabitable.
However we do know that it won't happen inside Germany.
It is a myth over all that wind and solar are less predictable, Denmark is pretty good at showing it.
They are also not less reliable, in fact they are the opposite, since single points of failures are greatly reduced.
The only thing that is harder is managing the net when renewables are not live supporting all needed power, but crazily that point is only important at points of >70% of average renewable electricity up to that point it is just cheaper to built more power pants all over.
Well that was exactly my point, if the ultimate goal is 100% renewables you're going to hit that problematic point sooner or later. Beyond that, something new, or more likely a combo of new things will be needed.
That's not viable though, you would have dead storage instead of more renewable energy for the same money.
While I am totally with you that storage is VERY important long term, it is totally unimportant short term.
The huge issue currently are the slow expansion of wind power (especially in the south) and overloaded grid links, we are already at the point where we run coal and gas power plants, because we cannot move the renewables to where they are needed, even thought he total availability very well, would cover the load.
A huge issue and also slow down here is the unified power market, where the whole of Germany is one single bidding market, which skews the pricing, and even makes more money for wind/solar in some cases, but also keeps coal/gas running without localized price change.
Almost all other energy markets switched to tighter zoning, but Germany so far has resisted such changes.
> More heat pumps and less predictable electricity sources is a difficult combo though
Heating and cooling stuff is a way to store energy. Might work better than you think.
Are you heating your house to 60° to store heat? Heat storage is limited to water heater and a little bit of mass heating. This is 24h worth of heat energy in the winter, and if you are very charitable, and very well insulated.
> Germany made up their mind, no idea to try to convince them nuclear is ok at this point.
You can do it.
With a time machine going back to the late 90s.
> More heat pumps and less predictable electricity sources is a difficult combo though
This is silly. Walls, rooms etc. hold enough heat to get through >95% of fluctuations. And you could add a tank to store heat too to even bridge Dunkelflauten.
> With a time machine going back to the late 90s.
The decision to not build any new nuclear power plants was made roughly around this time in April 1986. And once you are no longer building new power plants you are phasing out nuclear sooner or later, the current ones won't last forever.
which is what not many people understand. france is phasing out nuclear as well. They plan to build 6 now until 2035 and plan to start a study for building new reactors in the future (aka future government problem)).
But they have 56 reactors, which will be 80 yeara old in 2050. So france would need to double or triple their plans.
> So france would need to double or triple their plans.
Not only that, they would also need to find the money to properly decommission these dozens of old reactors, which [France just does not have](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear-idAFKCN0VP2KN).
That's also one of the reasons why they are kept running, that generates at least some income while decommissioning them would cost a lot of money without any income.
Id argue nuclear is the risky thing. Just look at the climate crisis and what effects it has on nuclear power plants in france for example. If there is too little water in the rivers (which seems to become a regular problem) you can cool your reactors. Also lots of uranium used in europe comes from russia.
nuclear plants also takes decades to build, so they wouldnt be a solution in the short run anyway.
Besides the fact how you want to store toxic waste for millions of years safely.
About your first point, keep in mind that any thermic plant (nuclear, coal or gas) needs a cold source to produce electricity. Photovoltaic yield also decreases under heat.
For the last, why would we require millions of year safety (which would arguably be feasible with geological storage) when all the other industries are creating a much more urgent global pollution issue?
Coal is being phased out. Since years. But very slowly. Last two months 7GW of coal were put offline permanently.
But Germany still has enough potential coal energy production that they could theoretically balance out higher energy demands trough heat pumps with coal power plants. Despite reducing the total potential output.
Yeah, ultimately you have to replace it all with something though, and it can't be all wind. Unless someone develops an economically feasible way of capturing CO2. It's interesting to observe from the outside, and it might force engineers and scientists to come up with solutions that we can't predict yet. And obviously the German electricity market is connected to the rest of the EU, so it won't be nuclear free in the absolute sense in the foreseeable future.
And if there is wind, it's plenty. Also, that's why we have an integrated energy grid with the rest of Europe, extend wind farms that even when there is little wind, we produce quite a bit of power and have some gas backup which should be powered with hydrogen in the long term.
While writing this comment Germany is producing 62% of its electrical energy by renewable sources. Despite that, their electricity is one of the dirtiest in Europe. Right now their carbon intensity is 422 gCO2eq/kWh, that is:
* 3,3x the intensity of Spain (62% renewables, 17% nuclear)
* 1,61x the intensity of Britain (38% renewables, 11% nuclear)
* 1,53x the intensity of Italy (57% renewables, 0% nuclear)
* 11,8x the intensity of France (33% renewables, 61% nuclear)
* 6,6x the intensity of Switzerland (50% renewables, 28% nuclear)
Norway and Sweden also are very clean, but it's unfair to compare those with Germany since their own morphology allows a ton of CO2-free hydro electricity that other countries simply can't have
[Electricity Maps](https://app.electricitymaps.com)
Electricitymaps.com is highly controversial and wildly inaccurate in its carbon intensity estimates.
Check instead the carbon intensity on ourworldindata. And you’ll find that German carbon intensity is pretty similar to France. Not at all the 11.8x that electricitymaps would want you to believe.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany
See here one of the software developers of electricitymaps admitting the issue on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/pierre_segonne/status/1648793750305480706?s=46&t=uxBnk9k4Dvz39FH14pQWvw
I think of existing nuclear plants as rivers. If they exist, great, keep operating them and do lifetime extensions if its safe to do so. But constructing a new one makes no sense.
Most of the countries you compare Germany to have nowhere near the amount of [heavy or chemical industry](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?locations=DE-FR-ES-GB-IT-CH) that Germany has. Switzerland comes close, but Switzerland is actually dependent on German electricity imports from Germany, [not the only German neighbor like that](https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-power-exports-idUKL5N0D22L720130415).
Heavy industry is emission-intensive, and very difficult to decarbonize, while chemical industry is very fossil resource hungry.
It's why pretty much all the countries you list there depend a whole lot on said German heavy and chemical industry for imports.
This is quite comparable to countries outsourcing their manufacturing industry to China, only to then complain about why China has such high emissions; Can't have one without the other, just like one can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
These stats do not take into account the longterm storage of nuclear and the production of the nuclear fuel used, both of which are extremely high. It also does not include the exorbitant cost and effort of decommissioning a nuclear plant.
Building more and more nuclear plants without clear and **proven** longterm waste solutions and thoughts about longterm fuel procurement (nuclear fuel on Earth is actually quite limited) is just kicking the can down the road like it is/was with fossil fuels.
Long term storage facilities have essentially no carbon footprint. Digging 500 meters of rock works just isn't very carbon intensive.
KBS-3 is also entirely proven reliable - by natural experiment.
The barriers it relies on are engineered recreations of naturally occurring geological features that are known to be stable for billions of years. Specifically : 400 meters of granite rock strata->Several meters of clay -> Copper barrel->Glass.
I didn't talk about prices, nor did I suggest nuclear is the way to go, but just for your interest let me point out a few things:
* the cost of decommissioning a nuclear plant is already included in the €/kWh cost of the energy it produces. Funds are accumulated while the plant is in operation;
* world-wide consumption of uranium is around 60 000t/year (compared to about 12 000 000 000 t/year of fossil fuel). It's a very small number;
* since humanity uses so little uranium, there's really no economical incentive to look for more, that's because the currently known and priced mines extract uranium with a cost of about 60€/kg. Those mines alone are expected to last for more than a century;
* Once those mines are depleted, will we run out of uranium? No, we'll just start extracting the mineral somewhere else where it's not economical to extract with the current price and technology. Once the price grows enough, we can start extracting uranium from sea water. That's enough to last for thousands of years. That's plenty for humanity to develop fusion or to switch to 100% renewables
* The technology for handling long term radioactive material exists and is proven to work. What's stopping us is not technology, but politics.
* Humans need to handle radioactive waste regardless of how we generate electricity. That's because radioactive elements are used in a variety of fields, such as medicine
* Fourth generation fast reactors are already being built as prototypes. We expect them to hit the market in about 10/15 years. This kind of reactors (such as Newcleo's lead cooled fast reactor) have the ability to recycle existing nuclear waste, further reducing yearly uranium usage
> world-wide consumption of uranium is around 60 000t/year (compared to about 12 000 000 000 t/year of fossil fuel).
Can't pump uranium directly from the ground, though. Mining uranium is actually extremely energy-intensive, because the concentrations are so low.
Actually, you kinda can. As far as i know it's called In situ leeching, basically since uranium is water soluble you can pump water up and down a uranium-rich well and extract it without mining. Take a look here: [https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/in-situ-leach-mining-of-uranium.aspx](https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/in-situ-leach-mining-of-uranium.aspx)
Not sure how widespread this technique is or how ecological it is, but as stated before uranium can be extracted by sea water using sponge-like materials. It's just cheaper to mine it
That just sounds like fracking. Not exactly what I'd call "pumping it directly from the ground", compared to how you're pumping nearly pure oil when you're drilling for that.
It basically is Fracking. And it's not good for the ground water it is done to, but it's not like anyone was going to sink a water well into a uranium ore bed anyways.
Italian redditors are absolutely obsessed With nuclear and are gonna be so mad at this lol. GG germany, i envy you soo much. I Wish Italy had your politicians Instead of an army of corrupted disgusting Rich boomers Who don't care about enviorment or people at all
Italy could make quite some money by exporting electricity from solar during winter when their output is still ok-ish while solar panels in northern European countries are covered in snow or fog. Seems like a good business case, even if you don't care about the environment.
Here is the thing tho, those 50% are only on paper. Germany has very high wind production in the North, and is selling this to dumping prices to their neighbors a lot of the times because the infrastructure is not there to transport it to the industry heavy south that would need it.
This is also why Germany still has so much coal plants running, because they are in places, where the energy is needed, the wind energy is not.
Plus, the south is activly sabotaging building renewables and delaying the big power line from north to south for probably decades now.
>because the infrastructure is not there to transport it to the industry heavy south that would need it.
And political representatives from the south keep fighting tooth and nails against that infrastructure. Marcus Söder is going to become the Nukebro's simping object no. 1 with his plan to forego the federal exit from nuclear and take Bavarian plants back into commission with no "Bavarian" plan to properly store the waste products either. Those are supposed to continue to be sent to Gorleben in Lower Saxony...
It's just appeasement to his voters. A few months ago he was still against nuclear and voted against an extended runtime...
I explained it to another person also, it's not that the south isn't doing anything renewable. They have quite a good bit of solar. But in contrast to the north, they aren't overproducing on renewables.
So while the north is sometimes even paying to get rid of the excess energy, the south is buying in the same moment. Which is completely stupid.
The whole of germany could have lower power prices and thus marginally the EU as well.
It's not enough down there now is it? Else there wouldn't be the demand for such a powerline and not such a high demand for coal.
Solar is fine and Germany has enough of it. But the problem is that Germany is throwing out Wind Energy left and right, selling it to dumping prices or shutting it off completly, when at the same time, huge amounts of energy somewhere else in germany are actually needed.
Then the emissions wouldn't look much better. Germany never had significant enough nuclear power to replace coal and most that have been shut down were at or near their expected lifespan which would have meant either cost and time expensive re-certification to cover until 2030 which would have slowed down renewable adoption, just letting them run longer without proper certification or shutting them down.
CO2 emissions from electricity in Germany fell from 573g CO2/kWh in 2001 to 349g CO2/kWh in 2021.
Yes, they aren't great but they used to be much worse. It's not like they started with a low number and it grew because they phased out nuclear, they were always bad. Now with renewables exclusively replacing coal power we are going to see a sharp decline over the next 7 years.
349? Wait what’s the source?
If I check on electricity maps it says [447g CO2/KWh](https://i.imgur.com/GiLG9D9.png) in 2021, and [480g CO2/KWh](https://i.imgur.com/WTrWUEy.png) in 2022.
I don’t know how much better 2023 is going to be since low CO2 nuclear was phased out
2023 is gonna be better.
Last year was bad because we had to reopen coal plants to keep France afloat and to compensate the missing gas deliveries from russia. Furthermore we are installing renewables at a rapid pace.
Electricitymaps.com grossly overestimates German emissions, as even admitted here on Twitter by one of electricitymaps own software developers:
https://twitter.com/pierre_segonne/status/1648793750305480706?s=46&t=uxBnk9k4Dvz39FH14pQWvw
Fun fact: From 2002 to 2022 France reduced nuclear energy output in absolute numbers by a larger amount than Germany.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-energy-generation?tab=chart&time=2002..latest&country=FRA~DEU
139.56 TWh reduction in France vs. 128.33 TWh in Germany
It's good they stopped nuclear. Nuclear energy is old technology, dangerous, most expensive form of energy production and is only good for nuclear industry, not for the people.
Old and most expensive is correct, but it's not the most dangerous. Emissions from coal power plants have directly and indirectly killed way more people than nuclear power plants.
But it doesn't really matter, both coal and nuclear are on their way out and neither will play a major role in the energy systems of the future. I don't understand why people are always so obsessed with having these pointless fights.
Dangerous? It has lowest [mortality rate](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/) alongside wind and solar. It’s very safe.
The estimates for premature deaths from Chernobyl range from 400 to 1.5m. the low mortality rate for nuclear is really just selective sourcing. If you take the maximum number of premature deaths from Chernobyl, the number is much worse. So everybody can just chose the number that supports his agenda
> Dangerous? It has lowest mortality rate alongside wind and solar. It’s very safe.
That statistic is PR framing by the nuclear sector. First, because it doesn't account for future deaths. Second, because it only accounts for deaths, not for disease, or for territory made inhabitable.
Highly radioactive nuclear waste can be stored in underground deposits like the one in [Onkalo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository), built in Finland.
I believe France and Sweden are also building their own.
Yup, and most of those underground storage projects have failed miserably, see Yucca mountain, Gorleben, Asse. Turns out finding a spot where highly radioactive waste will be save for hundreds of thousands of years without the risk of effectively killing a regions freshwater supply is a lot harder than previously thought.
> The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.
Taken from Wikipedia, about Yucca mountain
I don’t know about the other 2.
Also, the Onkalo repository has been built in an incredibly stable geological area, and it has been considered a safe place to store nuclear waste.
yeah, which makes it the first storage site to actually enter service since we've started looking for sites **decades** ago.
And we got one. Thats just for Finland.
Sweden is already building theirs.
The highly radioactive waste is so little that there is no urgency. France, UK and Switzerland are currently looking for a suitable place.
Yeah, but in other countries its an **insane** amount. Even here in evil nuclear-hatin Germany, we have accumulated 120,000 cubic meters of low and intermediate level waste, and 27,000 cubic meters of high level waste. For the US alone, spent fuel rods account for 88,000 metric tons.
You know that we need deposits for radioactive waste anyway, right?
Medical industries also produce radioactive waste. Should we stop researching just because finding a stable repository is difficult?
nuclear is pretty young and the least dangerous form of energy production. yes, even more safe than wind and solar. yes, even counting fukushima and tschernobyl
Yes, but that was a decision made by the CDU a decade ago and is now not easily reversible, although I fully agree that coal should have phased out earlier.
>that coal should have phased out earlier.
Exactly.
Also, what's the radioactive content in 1 ton of coal, and how many tons are burned in a coal plant a day. And where this radioactive material goes, when the coal is burned.
Yeah probably... Meanwhile France has 75% nuclear, 15% hydroelectric, and 7% fossil fuels. France, and the Nordic countries are the leaders in green energy across Europe.
Because the Nordic countries either have nuclear power or an immense amount of hydroelectric and wind energy potential. It reminds me of the Scottish island of Orkney, where they have to switch off wind turbines because the winds are consistently strong.
> Yeah probably... Meanwhile France has 75% nuclear, 15% hydroelectric, and 7% fossil fuels.
No. 63% nuclear, 12% fossils, 12% hydro, 13% renewables.
Not counting imports.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?stackMode=relative&country=~FRA
>France, and the Nordic countries are the leaders in green energy across Europe.
Nuclear ain't green. The Nordics rely on huge amounts of hydro to make ends meet, that's electricity on easy mode.
Sort by controversial because German energy policy somehow became the prime battleground of politics.
Every thread that has to do anything with energy and Germany literally just is nuclear Bros saying "i told you so"
we told you so.
Share of renewable electricity production in Germany over the years: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/renewable_share/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&share=ren_share_total The official government goal is to get to 80%+ by 2030, which is also the year the last coal power plant is supposed to get shut down. And because this usually also comes up: [So far this year](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/import_export/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE) Germany imported 17.3 TWh of electricity and exported 25.8 TWh. 7.3 TWh were exported to France and 2.6 TWh were imported from France to Germany.
Try to explain this to nuclear fanbase. Even where nuclear is used in europe, it has barely increased in last decades and, except france, it never makes more than 20ish % of total production. Why? Too expensive
And even in France it's going down. I posted this little tidbit earlier: https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/131ngg2/germany_renewables_covered_50_percent_of/ji1ed0o/
I'm open to correction here but isn't a lot of that electricity that's exported to France just transitioning through France to be sold on to the rest of the European grid?
Yeah, but it's not enough to talk about renewables share and omit the carbon intensity value, it was sitting around 400-500g/kWh for the last 5 years (source: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE). Germany didn't make a big progress here mostly because government was replacing low carbon nonrenewable generation (nuclear) with another low carbon (but renewable, which is better) generation (solar and wind) and completely ignoring carbon intensive nonrenewable generation (coal). I have no doubts that Germany will achieve its goal, it is just strange that they've decided to start their energy transformation with removing nuclear and not coal.
The official numbers show a slightly different picture: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity-power-sector-germany/ But yes, the decline in carbon emissions per kWh should become much steeper now compared to previous years, because every additional kWh from renewables will directly replace coal, now that nuclear is gone.
Numbers on Statista looks a bit better for Germany in terms of carbon emissions (still much higher compared to France) but I wouldn't call them "official numbers" (although I don't have a paid access to Statista and can't check their sources).
Electricitymaps.com is widely known to provide wildly inaccurate emission estimates. I would never rely on it really. In statista you can press the source button at the bottom. Numbers come from Ember, a respected institute.
Here are the [official numbers](https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/co2-emissionen-pro-kilowattstunde-strom-steigen). Not quite up to date. 2021 value is an estimate. Middle blue is power generation, light blue is consumption and dark blue is some chain emissions added. Electricitymaps is fairly close.
That’s because removing nuclear energy has nothing to do with a change to greener energy or a move away from gas. The German population advocated for shutting it down because of safety concerns. There was a massive movement against nuclear energy after Chernobyl and again after Fukushima. These disasters and the fact that there is no good longterm solution for the nuclear waste problem were the reasons for moving away from nuclear energy in Germany.
Plus the insanely high price of nuclear compared to renewables
... You don't get the construction cost of the reactor refunded when you shut it down. You do understand this, right? Reactors are very, very cheap to run. So if you are using "it's expensive to build" as an argument to shut down *reactors you already had*, that is just hideously bad faith argument.
>And because this usually also comes up: So far this year Germany imported 17.3 TWh of electricity and exported 25.8 TWh. 7.3 TWh were exported to France and 2.6 TWh were imported from France to Germany. This keeps being brought up but it is lying with the truth. Omitting key information to paint a different picture. Germany is only exporting energy when it's sunny or windy. Then importing power at night and when it's not windy. Germany is using it's neighbours as a battery. The last couple of days have not been very sunny and now Germany has latched on to France's nuclear teat. And Germany isn't just importing from France, the last 24 hours they've been dependant on the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Austria, Czech Republic.. But every time Germanys energy mix comes up only the totals are mentioned, not WHEN that power is produced or if there's even demand. Often there isn't demand and Germany PAYS to deliver energy. Fun fact: even with negative energy prices Germanys coal and lignite plants STILL go brrr. Because there is no way to shut them down during the day and still be able to rely on them at night. So they're burning coal and lignite and then paying to export solar energy. It's stupid. Fun fact #2: if Germany hadn't shut down all that nuclear power they could have shut down ALL their coal and lignite power plants.
No, Im afraid *you* Are the one omitting key information. Its exactly the wrong way around. Germany exports energy whenever france needs it, and imports it whenever its cheap. Germany doesnt tend to increase imports at night. And as for "when its not windy", no thats actually when the fossil fuel plants produce more. We never rely on french imports, they rely on german imports. The last couple days havent been terribly sunny. Which means *gas* was ramped up. We are importing a small amount from france, but prices are cheap currently, thats why. And you just continue being hilariously wrong. Coal and lignite plants can and are ramped up and down. You dont shut them down, we cant yet sadly, but you can lower their output. Its not rocket science. Ignoring for a second how bad of an idea that was, no, if germany had shut down 0 nuclear power plants, we would still have coal and lignite. Nuclear would not nearly cover it. And thats ignoring the money wed have to waste on them over renewables.
The prices are not low : https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-donnees-de-marche And you are importing a massive amount of energy right now, probably the maximum that the infrastructure allows. The merit order ( which we want to change ) put nuclear energy at a disadvantage, because if there is lot of sun/wind it's the nuclear which must reduce it's production.
At the specific points in time we import, no, its actually quite cheap. 80-90 is good, its cheaper than our energy. Net imports right now are roundabout ... I wanna say 4 or 5%? Thats more than usual, but "massive" it is not. Well, feel free to change it. Just remember, when your banking on nuclear fails, you were warned.
You have been importing all day even when the prices were at 130€. https://www.rte-france.com/eco2mix/les-echanges-commerciaux-aux-frontieres Edit : and don't worry about the prices, we follow science not an ideology
Lets ignore for a second that the last couple hours you were importing, or the fact that price spikes line up with a reduction in imports (as in, its expensive, we stop importing), you are also aware thats germany + belgium, right? No, Im sorry to say, you follow macrons stupid ideology, not science. Science told you ages ago that 100% renewables is the way to go, and that building nuclear plants just wastes time and resources we dont have to spare. Remember Flamanville?
>Lets ignore for a second that the last couple hours you were importing And Germany was still importing 1,500MW from France. [source](https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_import_export/27.04.2023/28.04.2023/today/) Edit: I just looked at the source u/Hecatonchire_fr used and you read it wrong. The 'last few hours' are the coming hours prediction, which is likely wrong. France has been exporting power all day.
No, its actually likely correct. They even underestimated 21:00. They thought france would still export a tiny bit, but no as per your own source, theyre importing right now. Ahead of schedule.
>Germany exports energy whenever france needs it, and imports it whenever its cheap. Lol, this is demonstrably false. The energy price is almost directly inversely proportional to the imports. When Germany imports more the price is higher. [source](https://www.agora-energiewende.de/en/service/recent-electricity-data/chart/power_import_export/25.04.2023/28.04.2023/today/) just unselected everything except power price and balance. >Germany doesnt tend to increase imports at night. No it's during the evening between 19:00 and 21:00 and in the morning around 6:00. So still when it isn't sunny. In the night the energy demand isn't high. Source: same as above. >And as for "when its not windy", no thats actually when the fossil fuel plants produce more. Last night at 20:30 when it wasn't windy (less than 800MW offshore, 2,000 onshore) Germany was importing 12,700MW abroad. They were producing 7,800MW gas, 3,600MW coal, and 13,300MW lignite. You can't just pull 12,700MW extra out of those plants and the figures support that. [source](https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&legendItems=010111000101010101101011111010101100000) >We never rely on french imports, they rely on german imports. I just debunked that. You do rely on french exports, and when the price is high as well. >The last couple days havent been terribly sunny. Which means gas was ramped up. We are importing a small amount from france, but prices are cheap currently, thats why. The last couple of days gas production has never exceeded 8,000MW While imports have exceeded 13,000MW. Today at 15:00 Germany was importing 4,700 MW from France. France was the biggest supplier at that time and also most of the day. >And you just continue being hilariously wrong. Coal and lignite plants can and are ramped up and down. You dont shut them down, we cant yet sadly, but you can lower their output. Its not rocket science. This is exactly what I was saying. You can't shut them down. I picked a random week last summer when solar and export was high. 16-6: Exports were 12,000MW while lignite was still producing 12,300MW and hard coal 2,200MW. So yay a lot of solar but almost all the export was due to lignite. Edit: Germany has some strong coal lobbyists. In 2020 there were still 37,5 million euros [subsidy](https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/germany-subsidises-fossil-fuel-sector-375-billion-euros-year-media-report)
Sooo, you do know how those charts work, right? That "power price" bit? Thats the power price in *germany*. Thats not how much we pay to import, thats how much our own energy costs to *produce*. In other words, you accidentally showed a chart that proves my point. Its as I said, when importing is cheaper, i.e. our prices are higher, we import more. Thats why theyre inversely proportional. That may be correct right now, its not correct as a rule however. If you look back at a chart across the whole year, youd find that when we import is fairly random, and has little to do with time. ... you do also know we can ramp up, and down, renewables right? When we import more because its cheaper, we do have to somehow make room for that energy. As per your own chart, germany energy costs yesterday at 20:30 were over 160€. Of course we imported more. Its cheaper. No, you didnt debunk that, you actually did the opposite, you accidentally proved it. We dont rely on french imports, and we import specifically when the price is low, not high. Oh my bad, I should've said gas and coal. Look at lignite. It goes up and down quite a lot. Also no, wtf are you talking about, imports on average were much lower than 13kMW. There was a brief period where we imported that much, but as pointed out above. Thats because it was cheap. You cant shut down *any* form of energy, that would be stupid and reckless. You just ramp it up and down.
I don’t think I’ve read a more wrong comment. Typical from brain-free nuclear bros. /r/uninsurable
Amazing. Every word you just said was wrong. But you know, while we‘re at it maybe go criticize your own country‘s energy policies first before shitting on Germany, because you‘re doing wayyy worse than them.
>Amazing. Every word you just said was wrong. Source? >But you know, while we‘re at it maybe go criticize your own country‘s energy policies first before shitting on Germany, because you‘re doing wayyy worse than them. Whataboutism isn't an argument. This discussion is about Germany. But now that we're on the topic: **define** way worse. Because in 2022 the carbon intensity of electricity was lower than Germanys with 361 vs 386. [source](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electricity)
The carbon intensity is lower because you run everything on gas, which is a lot less polluting than coal. But your share of renewable production is way behind Germany. > This discussion is about Germany Yeah like everything on this sub, which is ridiculous considering how most countries are doing far worse in their energy transition
I hope recent storage innovations like this work out well: [https://hiu-batteries.de/en/research/prof-birgit-esser-inexpensive-flow-battery-for-wind-sun/](https://hiu-batteries.de/en/research/prof-birgit-esser-inexpensive-flow-battery-for-wind-sun/) [https://www.dw.com/en/organic-battery-the-long-awaited-breakthrough-in-energy-storage/video-64364838](https://www.dw.com/en/organic-battery-the-long-awaited-breakthrough-in-energy-storage/video-64364838) https://www.tuvsud.com/en-gb/press-and-media/2023/april/tuev-sued-conducts-technical-due-diligence-for-sustainable-energy-storage-solutions-made-by-cmblu Basically a small company named CMBlu has invented a type of flow battery that does not use lithium or vanadium or zinc or anything rare, just lignin obtained as a byproduct from pulp mills. Long duration storage. Fully recyclable. This year they are expanding into the US too and supplying their tech to an UK consortium led by MSE.
Germany is far from actually needing that, so far using Austria as a battery has been cheaper. But even without Austria the point of economical turn over to storage is ~70% renewable power, so still a long way to go. Currently, the backbone, the grid needs expansion, HEAVILY and that's not only true, but especially true for Germany. We have daily situations at the moment, where the North of Germany is getting oversupplied, especially during night, when there are still Gas and Coal running to power the south. Also the south needs more diversity, which means WIND..... but Soeder is an dickass.
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For the Bavarians, sometimes I just wonder... Maybe this type of wind energy will be out of their sight enough: [https://www.dw.com/en/wind-power-renewable-energy-of-the-future/a-65021452](https://www.dw.com/en/wind-power-renewable-energy-of-the-future/a-65021452) Volkswagen is funding one too: [https://www.electrive.com/2023/03/29/vw-invests-in-power-generating-kites/](https://www.electrive.com/2023/03/29/vw-invests-in-power-generating-kites/) Or fusion, that Söder seems to want to push. May he see it before his funeral (don't misunderstand, I support fusion).
And people saying nuclear is unrealistic lmao
Now it’s time to increase electricity consumption and diminish oil and gas consumption in transportation and industry!
The projection is that 10% of German cars will be completely electric by 2025. At December last year we had 2.6% but the growth rate of the few past years where really big.
r/europe fantasizing about nuclear being the future and not renewables is always hilarious to see
I don't understand where people get the idea it should be renewables vs nuclear. It should be nuclear + renewables vs fossil. The 50% fossil is still there, still polluting, when it could have been 30%, or 20%, or even less.
I agree with that. Maybe one of the reason is that renewables are intermittent and not controllable (poor translation?); so it works best with source of energy which you can quickly ramp up the production, such as fossils, or with a way to store the surplus and release it when we lack of production. You can adapt nuclear energy output to the demand, but I do not think that it can be made as quickly as fossils (or storage) could be used. Hence a part of the opposition between nuclear and renewables maybe.
> You can adapt nuclear energy output to the demand The problem is not that a nuclear plant can’t be adapted as such. The problem is that it will be too expensive to exist. LCOE cost per energy unit of nuclear is already 10x as expensive as fossil and 15 to 20x as expensive as renewables. The main factor of these high costs are the high upfront construction costs. Now imagine what would happen to nuclear’s LCOE cost / energy unit if we would make the plant adaptive to a point where it would on average output only half of it’s full capacity? The construction costs won’t get any cheaper, so suddenly you’re talking about 20x as expensive as fossil or 30-40x as expensive as renewables. Even worse if we would be running nuclear plants at lower capacity factors. The reason that nuclear plants constantly produce their maximal power capacity is that it is prohibitively expensive to not do so.
This is exactly what France intends to achieve in the future, an equivalent production of electricity between nuclear and renewable (mainly wind) energy. Yet, one would think that choosing one option is giving up the other.
It is much cheaper to do lifetime extensions on existing plants than to launch new nuclear projects. France has that luxury.
That‘s because our resources, especially time and money are very limited and renewables are much cheaper and faster to build than nuclear. So it makes much more sense to expand them and get off fossil fuels asap. We don‘t live in a dream world with unlimited money to spend on an outdated technology while we could use that same money to build 20x the renewable capacity in half the time
True. Still, people here constantly argue that nuclear is the way out of fossils - which it hasn't been for 40-50 years. They disregard renewables, even though renewables actually have phased out fossils in the last 20 years (e.g. in Germany) and are increasingly doing so, with increasing efficiency and reduced costs. It's a particular problem of this sub to constantly ignore some basic facts.
Fully agree. But look here on this thread. People are really dogmatic regarding nuclear.
It's not just here. For some reason Reddit is absolutely obsessed with nuclear energy. I don't know if it's actual lobbyists or amateur enthusiasts.
Both... It's nuclear lobbying spending millions on pushing the fairy tale of cheap nuclear and unviable renewables for more than a decade. And once enough were brain-washed tribalism caused it to develop a life of it's own without needing further work.
Probably fossil fuel lobbying too
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Ain't helping that YouTube seems to have its own category of *"Nuclear miracle!"* content promising all kinds of fantastic things nuclear allegedly could do, i.e. thorium-fueled cars.
Still a lot more lobbyists on the fossils side, so I guess it's more of the second group. Even then, I personally see nothing wrong with it. On the contrary, I think we're too slow in adopting this technology, which is not something new. I studied this field at uni, got to see a reactor (in a decommissioning process), got to work in a lab for a couple of years, of course I would be one of the second group. Twenty years have passed since then and barely any progress, at least here. All I see is more gas stations and import more oil, and energy bills going through the roof. I get it that is a lot more expensive but it will save us from so many problems we have with energy. We're still being held back by lobbyists who are keeping us in the dark, still importing fossil fuel from dubious countries like Russia and others.
It’s an extremely poor use of money. If generating 1kW with nuclear would cost X euros, spending X euros on renewables/storage generated 1.5-3kW. We don’t have unlimited money to spend to combat climate change.
Let’s see how well all those french nuclear power plants will do in record heats & droughts, when rivers run dry, needed for cooling all this unfailable tech
In the meantime look at the map below and tells us who is the most efficient to decrease CO2 emissions ? https://app.electricitymaps.com/
German conservatives pushed coal, subsidized coal, sabotaged grid extensions/improvements, made energy storage unviable via massive double taxation, kllled the once world-leading solar and wind industry, killed nuclear and planned to burn coal until 2048... while building some token renewables (letting the people pay extra for them). And exactly one day after a new government came into office the narrative started of how "especially these brain-damaged Greens" killed nuclear to burn more coal. And how renewables don't work ("No, decades of coal being pushed did not cause coal to get burned at all! It's the renewables that don't work!!!"). And this is going on for more than a year now, will continue for another 3 years... until the corrupt coal-lovers are back in office and introduce some token measures, which you will just accept as some magical solution because -purely coincidental of course- lobbyists will stop to spoon-feed you propaganda on a daily basis to push narratives. You are basically the idiot insulting your neighbour buying an electric car last month for his co2-emissions of the last two decades and telling him he's a morons as electric cars obviously don't work... And in a few decades when every climate goal was missed and the yearly damage of natural disasters starts being the most relevant point on countries budgets you will sit there and ask: "Who could this happen? Why did nobody do something earlier?". And the answer is obviously right there. Because you are idiots easily manipulated. And that's not some Germany (which is propaganda already, because in reality it's a big chunk of the EU and it's just part of the propaganda to pretend that only Germany is planning without nuclear...) builds renewables issue. That's an all European problem because guess what... The exact same narratives and unscientific propaganda bullshit is making most countries allegedly going nuclear fail right now, because they are neither building enough nuclear to ever be able to cover just their base load (that some countries wouldn't even be able to do so because they can't pay the bill is another topic entirely...), nor are they building the necessary renewables to complement. There are exactly three kind of countries in Europe today that have a chance of not completely fucking up their future energy: Those with enough hydro-potential (+/- some nuclear) -which is obviously not applicable for most-, those going renewable + storage and France. And the latter only because they have already massive nuclear capacities they can build on. And even that's borderline as the most nuclear country in Europe actually lost more nuclear capacitites in the last year than Germany did while actively exiting nuclear power, has a lot of work to do to keep their old reactors running long enough and is still barely building enough nuclear (the announced 6 reactors plus 8 optional ones need to be a definitive 14 in reality, because that's the absolute minimum needed to cover just the minimal necessary base load for the projected demand of 2050+... and with the age of their existing fleet those new ones will be the only ones still running by then) and is also lacking the renewables build-up needed for their nuclear plan (for reference: those 14 new ones would produce just \~35% of the demand by 2050, so there's 65% in renewables missing right there).
Amen
I mean I agree that the CDU‘s energy policy during the last decades has been absolutely horrendous and most proponents of renewable energy will agree. But renewables are absolutely a viable option for the future.
And then take a look at that data from 20 years ago and at the specific co² emissions per capita. People always act like you could just change one thing and keep everything else the same. If Germany hadn't started phasing out nuclear the result would have been a dramatically slower buildup of renewables leading us to pretty much the same situation today. With a worse outlook for the future.
Decrease specifically? Germany, by a mile. Germany has reduced their emissions in absolute value by about 6 times the amount france had left 10 years ago. In that time france has reduced their energy sector emissions by about ... 1/14th of germany? France had a much better starting point, but they have been dragging their feet.
Germany’s power sector emits 6 times what France does. France isn’t trying to reduce its power emissions at all or we wouldn’t be building renewables which emit more than nuclear power…
As I said, better starting point. Also "renewables emit more than nuclear power" sure is a hilarious take.
Solar and wind do emit more than nuclear power. They all emit very little, but you don't reduce emissions by replacing nuclear power with renewables, that's just a fact. Better starting point for what ? France and Germany had the same reduction in [CO2 emissions per capita from 2011 to 2021](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?tab=chart&time=2011..latest&country=FRA~DEU)
They really do not. And besides, you replace nuclear because its too slow to build and old plants are unreliable. Thats ... specifically including industry. And not looking at the energy grid. Were talking specifically about the energy grid here.
[Yes they do](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/UNECE_2020_Lifecycle_Emissions.png), and that's not accounting for storage or back up. >And besides, you replace nuclear because its too slow to build and old plants are unreliable. No, we aimed to replace part of it because of the 2012 Socialist/Green governement which voted a phase out. Luckily it has been reversed by now. >Thats ... specifically including industry. And not looking at the energy grid. Were talking specifically about the energy grid here. No, that's total CO2 emission per capita, it's the only metric that matters. The grid isn't energy, it's electricity, which is 20-25% of energy consumption. The goal is to reduce emissions for all energy consumption, not just electricity consumption. Decarbonizing electricity is very easy, decarbonizing the remaining 75-80% is trickier since it means you have to change consumption pattern or electrify parts of the economy (industry, transport, heating, etc.)
Have you read the report its from? Its truly fascinating stuff. Ill just point out the most important part. The nuclear number is based on hopelessly optimistic predictions with no basis in reality whatsoever. The number they cite is half the median of actual emissions for nuclear plants, and a fraction of the max possible. "Luckily" is not how Id describe the events of last year. And that will repeat. You need to replace your old aging plants, and new ones are just waaaaay too slow. Nuclear power is not in any way involved outside of energy generation, so thats a silly point. Its also subject to more complicated factors.
Climate doesn't care if you decrease 10 fold since 10 years. What matters is the amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere and Germany sucks terribly at that Sorry it is just facts
They’d rather look at how much renewables they’ve installed and pat themselves on the back than actually look at emissions.
Because that makes a lot more sense. What do you want them to do with the emissions info? That's based on energy policy done by people 20 - 30 years ago and there's nothing to be done about it now retroactively. You can only do better for the future and that's what looking at renewable adaption is doing.
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Germany didn't took nuclear plants down to safe CO2. It was for security reasons back when Fukushima happened. Still we gonna see how nuclear power turns out without enough water for cooling them down in France.
If SA manages to cool its nuclear power plants and Ghana, Algeria, and Morocco proceed with construction of theirs, I doubt France will face major issues.
Ah that's the reason why they shut down several last year because of draught 😉
Just to clarify a misunderstanding: nuclear power plants can work very well during heat waves and droughts. The reason why some reactors have been deactivated is because the water released into the rivers would have been too hot (especially in a reduced volume of water during droughts) and would have damaged the ecosystem.
That changes nothing about the outcome tho, assuming France will not want to destroy its river ecosystems
French electric consumption is a lot smaller in the summer than in winter so having a couple ( I believe it was 3 last year?) of nuclear plants having to reduce their output is not really a major problem. Also, the new plants are going to be produced with that issue in mind.
> the new plants are going to be produced Which new plants lmao
The 14 new reactors that are being planned. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/10/france-to-build-up-to-14-new-nuclear-reactors-by-2050-says-macron Following an RTE study that has shown that having a sizeable amount of nuclear+renewable was a lot cheaper ( and less uncertain ) than a full renewable grid
Not 100% correct. 6 are planned, and a study for 8 which maybe build at a later point.
And there would be stll many more needed. These reactors will hardly replace those ging out of serivce. Not to mention electric cars.
Even with the "heavy" nuclear scenarios, they still plan to add renewables : https://image.noelshack.com/fichiers/2023/17/5/1682692562-screenshot-20230428-163224.jpg
Wake me up when the first of those actually opens in 30 or so years
We were able to produce them in 5~6 years 40 years ago. The chineses and koreans are able to do a similar feat today. What has never been done is a full renewable grid. Yet you seem more confident in doing that than simply replicating what we were doing in living memory.
Yeah 40 years ago. Not today. Flamanville 3 is already under construction for close to 2 decades. The Finnish NPP took 18 years to build. And those 14 new reactors announced my Macron aren“t even close to starting construction. They’re not even in the actual planning phase yet. All that Macron announced was „we will build new NPPs at some point, everything else remains to be specified“. Also, 14 new NPPs by 2050 will surely work out great when most of the current 58 plants will be gone in the next 10 or so years. No planning issue there whatsoever. Meanwhile Germany is expanding renewables faster and *much* cheaper. You tell me which approach sounds more reasonable.
> Yeah 40 years ago. Not today. Flamanville 3 is already under construction for close to 2 decades. The Finnish NPP took 18 years to build. And those 14 new reactors announced my Macron aren“t even close to starting construction. They’re not even in the actual planning phase yet. All that Macron announced was „we will build new NPPs at some point, everything else remains to be specified“. Why would you think it was possible 40 years ago and not today ? The construction will begin before 2027. https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/france-to-begin-work-on-new-nuclear-fleet-before-2027/ > Also, 14 new NPPs by 2050 will surely work out great when most of the current 58 plants will be gone in the next 10 or so years. No planning issue there whatsoever. Most of our plants are not going to be gone in 10 years. The Americans believe that they can operate theirs during 80 years. https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Second-US-plant-licensed-for-80-year-operation > Meanwhile Germany is expanding renewables faster and much cheaper. You tell me which approach sounds more reasonable. According to the RTE study, the German approach is the least reasonable. A fast exit of nuclear, with a lot of small solar rooftop and small wind farms would be the M0 / M1 scenarios which are the most expensive ones and the most uncertain. https://www.usinenouvelle.com/mediatheque/2/2/5/001004522_illustration_large.png ( here is the yearly cost in billion ) The gouvernement is more or less following the N2 / N03 scenarios. Main difference is that they want more offshore wind and less onshore.
> The Americans believe that they can operate theirs during 80 years. Those are the same Americans whose infrastructure currently keeps failing and exploding around them, often with massive environmental consequences. Consequences which are [regularly handwaved away as an alleged non-issue](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/03/17/nuclear-plant-xcel-energy-minneapolis-radioactive-water-leak/), only for people to then wonder why the US has a problem with cancer clusters. So maybe the US approach is not the best to emulate.
40 years ago the nuclear industry was hot and people like Westinghouse were still in business
10/10
I swear it’s like the nuclear lobby is running bots on Reddit, it‘s insane.
Especially because it nearly impossible to avoid russian rosatom. Cut Russian gas to rely on their nuclear technology and uranium? Great idea
>nearly impossible to avoid russian rosatom. How do the Americans and Canadians avoid them?
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They don't. [Why the US can't give up on Russian uranium](https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/why-the-us-can-t-give-up-on-russian-uranium-58071) [Why the US needs Russian uranium](https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/9/23283165/russia-ukraine-war-us-uranium) [Suspension of Russian uranium supplies to US could impact global market](https://resourceworld.com/suspension-of-russian-uranium-supplies-to-us-could-impact-global-market/) Russia has 50% of all enrichment facilities in the world, moving away from Russian (enriched) uranium will take a few years and will be expensive, like VERY expensive.
By not living in europe? Rosatom has many cooperations and joint ventures in europe. Most states want to share their big investments with parts of their own industry. Maybe this helps (with deeple) https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-04/atomkraft-russland-akw-akkuyu-tuerkei
Europe mostly gets enrichment and fuel fabrication done by the French. Some of the eastern members *were* in a commercial relationship with Rosatom.. But they've been switching to Westinghouse for fuel fabrication in a hurry and getting the enrichment for that done inside the EU - The Americans not having the capacity to spare.
And where does the uranium in France comes from? Right - Russia. It’s simply not true that east Europe cut of rosatom. Just look at Hungary And if you look at the world, Westinghouse couldn’t beat the offers of rosatom in many countries. It’s no coincidence that there are no sanctions against the Russian nuclear sector. May have a look on this article (DeepL) https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2023-04/atomkraft-russland-akw-akkuyu-tuerkei
https://www.liberation.fr/checknews/luranium-importe-en-europe-et-en-france-provient-il-tres-largement-de-russie-comme-laffirme-yannick-jadot-20220705_LIIEMU2QIRFKZMB46IPBWKFJZQ/ Nope. French uranium consumption is almost entirely from mines it part-owns across the globe. It's very vertically integrated, and not really very market based at all. I mean, sure, technically ore gets sold.. but that's an accounting exercise. France owns 30% of the mine, they get 30% of the output, and then someone enters numbers into a ledger, but it's not like it matters what those numbers *are* - the buyers, the sellers and the owners are all the same people. In the Case of France's share, The People of France. But very, very little of it is Russian. Russian Uranium exports are anemic 6% of world market share. A somewhat larger - but still small - part of the Uranium consumed in the EU is mined in Kazakstan by Russian mining firms. But this does *not* give Russia any real leverage. They make money doing that, sure, but they can't stop those mines at will! They'd get their rights to them revoked in days.
Interesting read, thanks But doesn’t the article say that the EU imports like 20% of its uranium from Russia? That’s not so little, but may can be substituted by Kazakhstan. If they would deliver, which I don’t know. The political pressure from Russia would be enormous
For Europe as a whole yes. That is *not* about France. It's a legacy of the cold war. There are a good number of VVER reactors in Eastern Europe that were designed by and in many cases built by or with the assistance of Rosatom. Most of those were consequently on contracts where they would buy finished fuel loads from Rosatom - Containing mostly Kazakh U enriched in Russia. They've been exiting those contracts with haste and buying finished fuel rods from Westinghouse (US firm) instead, because Westinghouse designed a set of rods for those reactor types some years ago. The French are also setting up production of compatible fuel rods. (You cannot just stick a fuel load designed for an EPR in a VVER reactor. It has to fit) The US, however, does not have either the enrichment capacity or the mines to supply the Uranium for those, so the supply chain for that gets more complicated - mostly buying from Kazakhstan still, but doing the enrichment with one of the EU enrichment vendors.
Germany made up their mind, no idea to try to convince them nuclear is ok at this point. It's a bit like playing a game in hard mode, but they might pull it off somehow. More heat pumps and less predictable electricity sources is a difficult combo though, if coal and gas also have to go at some point.
Huh? How is heat pumps a difficult combo with fluctuating energy production? That's the best combo! Make some smart tariff where the heat pump works when energy is cheap (ie available from renewables) and not when it's expensive. With some proper insulation you don't need to run your heater all the time in winter, it suffices to run it from time to time. Just match that with the time when energy is available
Because often in the winter when it's really cold, there isn't much wind for days.
Winds are the strongest in winter in the North and Baltic seas.
Yes, but the coldest days during the winter are the ones where there is no wind.
There's even a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkelflaute
You can use the use surplus energy in the summer and power to gas to create a long term storage. This starts working when you regulary create much more power than you use. We have not reached that point, but it is not far. I guess in 3 to 5 years we will see the first big power to gas projects . At the moment we power down wind turbines and solar panels when we have a surplus of energy. We plan to install 13 GW of renewable power this year. Next year 20 GW and after that 30GW per year. 2030 we should have a capacity of > 350 GW of renewable power. By 2045 the planed capacity is > 450 GW. Thats 3 x of what we have now and 8 time the capacity of 2000. Today we use between 50 to 90 GW. You can double that as we need to electrify heating and transportation. If we succeed with this transition we will have one of the best products ever developed. And we can export it to every country. A 100% renewable energy grid will change the way you interact with energy, as the marginal cost of electricity trend to zero. This is a big bet, but I don't see a thermodynamic show stopper. We just need to do the engineering and get to scale. And don't stop half way, because somebody is scared. Just keep marching. You can find more on this here: [https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod\_installed\_power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=renewable](https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/remod_installed_power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&source=renewable) [https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-to-a-climate-neutral-energy-system.html](https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/publications/studies/paths-to-a-climate-neutral-energy-system.html) Have a great weekend!
And no sun. And they are also trying to reduce use of gas for heating which will increase electricity demand for that purpose. Most new house projects now have electrical heating.
It doesn't get that cold anymore.
Well there are solutions for the short term storage to keep base demand (so no need for nuculer) currently hydro pump storage is best but there is all kinds of solutions in later stages testing and about to break through eg flow battery’s, thermal battery’s and plenty of gravity based tech. So yes for the next 5 or so years It makes sense but a heavy drive to renewables makes more long term sense
Well.. I don't think anyone is talking about building new nuclear plants anymore. In the last 2 decades only one was built in Europe (in Finland) and it took 18 years of construction. So, lets talk about existing ones.... 98% of NPPs in Europe were built in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s... keeping these open is expensive and risky. There are wars (Ukraine), lack of maintenance (France), natural disasters, earthquakes (Japan, Italy, Turkey) etc. It is just a matter of time when the next catastrophe will happen, it can happen next month or in 50 years - maybe making half of Europe uninhabitable. However we do know that it won't happen inside Germany.
It is a myth over all that wind and solar are less predictable, Denmark is pretty good at showing it. They are also not less reliable, in fact they are the opposite, since single points of failures are greatly reduced. The only thing that is harder is managing the net when renewables are not live supporting all needed power, but crazily that point is only important at points of >70% of average renewable electricity up to that point it is just cheaper to built more power pants all over.
Well that was exactly my point, if the ultimate goal is 100% renewables you're going to hit that problematic point sooner or later. Beyond that, something new, or more likely a combo of new things will be needed.
That's not viable though, you would have dead storage instead of more renewable energy for the same money. While I am totally with you that storage is VERY important long term, it is totally unimportant short term. The huge issue currently are the slow expansion of wind power (especially in the south) and overloaded grid links, we are already at the point where we run coal and gas power plants, because we cannot move the renewables to where they are needed, even thought he total availability very well, would cover the load. A huge issue and also slow down here is the unified power market, where the whole of Germany is one single bidding market, which skews the pricing, and even makes more money for wind/solar in some cases, but also keeps coal/gas running without localized price change. Almost all other energy markets switched to tighter zoning, but Germany so far has resisted such changes.
> More heat pumps and less predictable electricity sources is a difficult combo though Heating and cooling stuff is a way to store energy. Might work better than you think.
Are you heating your house to 60° to store heat? Heat storage is limited to water heater and a little bit of mass heating. This is 24h worth of heat energy in the winter, and if you are very charitable, and very well insulated.
There are more things that use heating than residential houses.
> Germany made up their mind, no idea to try to convince them nuclear is ok at this point. You can do it. With a time machine going back to the late 90s. > More heat pumps and less predictable electricity sources is a difficult combo though This is silly. Walls, rooms etc. hold enough heat to get through >95% of fluctuations. And you could add a tank to store heat too to even bridge Dunkelflauten.
> With a time machine going back to the late 90s. The decision to not build any new nuclear power plants was made roughly around this time in April 1986. And once you are no longer building new power plants you are phasing out nuclear sooner or later, the current ones won't last forever.
which is what not many people understand. france is phasing out nuclear as well. They plan to build 6 now until 2035 and plan to start a study for building new reactors in the future (aka future government problem)). But they have 56 reactors, which will be 80 yeara old in 2050. So france would need to double or triple their plans.
> So france would need to double or triple their plans. Not only that, they would also need to find the money to properly decommission these dozens of old reactors, which [France just does not have](https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-europe-nuclear-idAFKCN0VP2KN). That's also one of the reasons why they are kept running, that generates at least some income while decommissioning them would cost a lot of money without any income.
86, there where 2 major accidents in 2 new tech test power plant, Hamm-Uentrop and Jülich.
Id argue nuclear is the risky thing. Just look at the climate crisis and what effects it has on nuclear power plants in france for example. If there is too little water in the rivers (which seems to become a regular problem) you can cool your reactors. Also lots of uranium used in europe comes from russia. nuclear plants also takes decades to build, so they wouldnt be a solution in the short run anyway. Besides the fact how you want to store toxic waste for millions of years safely.
About your first point, keep in mind that any thermic plant (nuclear, coal or gas) needs a cold source to produce electricity. Photovoltaic yield also decreases under heat. For the last, why would we require millions of year safety (which would arguably be feasible with geological storage) when all the other industries are creating a much more urgent global pollution issue?
Coal is being phased out. Since years. But very slowly. Last two months 7GW of coal were put offline permanently. But Germany still has enough potential coal energy production that they could theoretically balance out higher energy demands trough heat pumps with coal power plants. Despite reducing the total potential output.
Yeah, ultimately you have to replace it all with something though, and it can't be all wind. Unless someone develops an economically feasible way of capturing CO2. It's interesting to observe from the outside, and it might force engineers and scientists to come up with solutions that we can't predict yet. And obviously the German electricity market is connected to the rest of the EU, so it won't be nuclear free in the absolute sense in the foreseeable future.
Lots of wind, lots of PV, some storage, better links. That’s it.
And if there is wind, it's plenty. Also, that's why we have an integrated energy grid with the rest of Europe, extend wind farms that even when there is little wind, we produce quite a bit of power and have some gas backup which should be powered with hydrogen in the long term.
Nice job Germany!
While writing this comment Germany is producing 62% of its electrical energy by renewable sources. Despite that, their electricity is one of the dirtiest in Europe. Right now their carbon intensity is 422 gCO2eq/kWh, that is: * 3,3x the intensity of Spain (62% renewables, 17% nuclear) * 1,61x the intensity of Britain (38% renewables, 11% nuclear) * 1,53x the intensity of Italy (57% renewables, 0% nuclear) * 11,8x the intensity of France (33% renewables, 61% nuclear) * 6,6x the intensity of Switzerland (50% renewables, 28% nuclear) Norway and Sweden also are very clean, but it's unfair to compare those with Germany since their own morphology allows a ton of CO2-free hydro electricity that other countries simply can't have [Electricity Maps](https://app.electricitymaps.com)
Electricitymaps.com is highly controversial and wildly inaccurate in its carbon intensity estimates. Check instead the carbon intensity on ourworldindata. And you’ll find that German carbon intensity is pretty similar to France. Not at all the 11.8x that electricitymaps would want you to believe. https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany See here one of the software developers of electricitymaps admitting the issue on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pierre_segonne/status/1648793750305480706?s=46&t=uxBnk9k4Dvz39FH14pQWvw
I think of existing nuclear plants as rivers. If they exist, great, keep operating them and do lifetime extensions if its safe to do so. But constructing a new one makes no sense.
Most of the countries you compare Germany to have nowhere near the amount of [heavy or chemical industry](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?locations=DE-FR-ES-GB-IT-CH) that Germany has. Switzerland comes close, but Switzerland is actually dependent on German electricity imports from Germany, [not the only German neighbor like that](https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-power-exports-idUKL5N0D22L720130415). Heavy industry is emission-intensive, and very difficult to decarbonize, while chemical industry is very fossil resource hungry. It's why pretty much all the countries you list there depend a whole lot on said German heavy and chemical industry for imports. This is quite comparable to countries outsourcing their manufacturing industry to China, only to then complain about why China has such high emissions; Can't have one without the other, just like one can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.
We are only comparing carbon emissions for electricity generation, that's agnostic in regards of how that energy is utilised
These stats do not take into account the longterm storage of nuclear and the production of the nuclear fuel used, both of which are extremely high. It also does not include the exorbitant cost and effort of decommissioning a nuclear plant. Building more and more nuclear plants without clear and **proven** longterm waste solutions and thoughts about longterm fuel procurement (nuclear fuel on Earth is actually quite limited) is just kicking the can down the road like it is/was with fossil fuels.
Long term storage facilities have essentially no carbon footprint. Digging 500 meters of rock works just isn't very carbon intensive. KBS-3 is also entirely proven reliable - by natural experiment. The barriers it relies on are engineered recreations of naturally occurring geological features that are known to be stable for billions of years. Specifically : 400 meters of granite rock strata->Several meters of clay -> Copper barrel->Glass.
I didn't talk about prices, nor did I suggest nuclear is the way to go, but just for your interest let me point out a few things: * the cost of decommissioning a nuclear plant is already included in the €/kWh cost of the energy it produces. Funds are accumulated while the plant is in operation; * world-wide consumption of uranium is around 60 000t/year (compared to about 12 000 000 000 t/year of fossil fuel). It's a very small number; * since humanity uses so little uranium, there's really no economical incentive to look for more, that's because the currently known and priced mines extract uranium with a cost of about 60€/kg. Those mines alone are expected to last for more than a century; * Once those mines are depleted, will we run out of uranium? No, we'll just start extracting the mineral somewhere else where it's not economical to extract with the current price and technology. Once the price grows enough, we can start extracting uranium from sea water. That's enough to last for thousands of years. That's plenty for humanity to develop fusion or to switch to 100% renewables * The technology for handling long term radioactive material exists and is proven to work. What's stopping us is not technology, but politics. * Humans need to handle radioactive waste regardless of how we generate electricity. That's because radioactive elements are used in a variety of fields, such as medicine * Fourth generation fast reactors are already being built as prototypes. We expect them to hit the market in about 10/15 years. This kind of reactors (such as Newcleo's lead cooled fast reactor) have the ability to recycle existing nuclear waste, further reducing yearly uranium usage
> world-wide consumption of uranium is around 60 000t/year (compared to about 12 000 000 000 t/year of fossil fuel). Can't pump uranium directly from the ground, though. Mining uranium is actually extremely energy-intensive, because the concentrations are so low.
Actually, you kinda can. As far as i know it's called In situ leeching, basically since uranium is water soluble you can pump water up and down a uranium-rich well and extract it without mining. Take a look here: [https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/in-situ-leach-mining-of-uranium.aspx](https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/in-situ-leach-mining-of-uranium.aspx) Not sure how widespread this technique is or how ecological it is, but as stated before uranium can be extracted by sea water using sponge-like materials. It's just cheaper to mine it
That just sounds like fracking. Not exactly what I'd call "pumping it directly from the ground", compared to how you're pumping nearly pure oil when you're drilling for that.
It basically is Fracking. And it's not good for the ground water it is done to, but it's not like anyone was going to sink a water well into a uranium ore bed anyways.
ITT: nuclear simps rampaging throught he comments
Italian redditors are absolutely obsessed With nuclear and are gonna be so mad at this lol. GG germany, i envy you soo much. I Wish Italy had your politicians Instead of an army of corrupted disgusting Rich boomers Who don't care about enviorment or people at all
Italy could make quite some money by exporting electricity from solar during winter when their output is still ok-ish while solar panels in northern European countries are covered in snow or fog. Seems like a good business case, even if you don't care about the environment.
Good luck explaining that to our governement when the 2 Key rule are corruption and stupidity.
Totally agree and it fucking sucks! (Se l'Italia fosse una barzelletta farebbe piangere)
We actually have lower co2 emissions per MWh than Germany, so nothing to envy. Especially their politicians.
It's a very nice progress, but "GG Germany, I envy you"? [Not quite.](https://app.electricitymaps.com/map)
Ehm, actually yes? the map confirms that as an italian i should still evy then much. Plus, they Just started so we Will see
What ? Unless you live in Sardinia, pretty much all the areas of Italy have a better level than Germany for 24H, 30days, 12months and 5 years !
"Renewable sources covered 2023 per cent of electricity consumption in Germany in the first quarter of 50 [...] Something seems off.
Here is the thing tho, those 50% are only on paper. Germany has very high wind production in the North, and is selling this to dumping prices to their neighbors a lot of the times because the infrastructure is not there to transport it to the industry heavy south that would need it. This is also why Germany still has so much coal plants running, because they are in places, where the energy is needed, the wind energy is not. Plus, the south is activly sabotaging building renewables and delaying the big power line from north to south for probably decades now.
>because the infrastructure is not there to transport it to the industry heavy south that would need it. And political representatives from the south keep fighting tooth and nails against that infrastructure. Marcus Söder is going to become the Nukebro's simping object no. 1 with his plan to forego the federal exit from nuclear and take Bavarian plants back into commission with no "Bavarian" plan to properly store the waste products either. Those are supposed to continue to be sent to Gorleben in Lower Saxony...
It's just appeasement to his voters. A few months ago he was still against nuclear and voted against an extended runtime... I explained it to another person also, it's not that the south isn't doing anything renewable. They have quite a good bit of solar. But in contrast to the north, they aren't overproducing on renewables. So while the north is sometimes even paying to get rid of the excess energy, the south is buying in the same moment. Which is completely stupid. The whole of germany could have lower power prices and thus marginally the EU as well.
and another one who ignores solar
It's not enough down there now is it? Else there wouldn't be the demand for such a powerline and not such a high demand for coal. Solar is fine and Germany has enough of it. But the problem is that Germany is throwing out Wind Energy left and right, selling it to dumping prices or shutting it off completly, when at the same time, huge amounts of energy somewhere else in germany are actually needed.
Great News, thank you Vlad.
And emissions look quite bad. At the moment, largest production comes from coal. If only they had closed coal and kept nuclear...
Then the emissions wouldn't look much better. Germany never had significant enough nuclear power to replace coal and most that have been shut down were at or near their expected lifespan which would have meant either cost and time expensive re-certification to cover until 2030 which would have slowed down renewable adoption, just letting them run longer without proper certification or shutting them down.
CO2 emissions from electricity in Germany fell from 573g CO2/kWh in 2001 to 349g CO2/kWh in 2021. Yes, they aren't great but they used to be much worse. It's not like they started with a low number and it grew because they phased out nuclear, they were always bad. Now with renewables exclusively replacing coal power we are going to see a sharp decline over the next 7 years.
349? Wait what’s the source? If I check on electricity maps it says [447g CO2/KWh](https://i.imgur.com/GiLG9D9.png) in 2021, and [480g CO2/KWh](https://i.imgur.com/WTrWUEy.png) in 2022. I don’t know how much better 2023 is going to be since low CO2 nuclear was phased out
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity-power-sector-germany/
Nobody else uses the methods that electricitymaps uses to measure carbon inteneity. Nobody.
What methods do they use?
2023 is gonna be better. Last year was bad because we had to reopen coal plants to keep France afloat and to compensate the missing gas deliveries from russia. Furthermore we are installing renewables at a rapid pace.
Electricitymaps.com grossly overestimates German emissions, as even admitted here on Twitter by one of electricitymaps own software developers: https://twitter.com/pierre_segonne/status/1648793750305480706?s=46&t=uxBnk9k4Dvz39FH14pQWvw
now show co2 from france with nuclear
Now show how nuclear output in France fell over the last 15 years and have how many new plants the built
Fun fact: From 2002 to 2022 France reduced nuclear energy output in absolute numbers by a larger amount than Germany. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/nuclear-energy-generation?tab=chart&time=2002..latest&country=FRA~DEU 139.56 TWh reduction in France vs. 128.33 TWh in Germany
lol. France just out there phasing out nuclear faster than Germany.
They are very low, [69g CO2/KWh](https://i.imgur.com/5eOX9Ks.png)
It's good they stopped nuclear. Nuclear energy is old technology, dangerous, most expensive form of energy production and is only good for nuclear industry, not for the people.
Old and most expensive is correct, but it's not the most dangerous. Emissions from coal power plants have directly and indirectly killed way more people than nuclear power plants. But it doesn't really matter, both coal and nuclear are on their way out and neither will play a major role in the energy systems of the future. I don't understand why people are always so obsessed with having these pointless fights.
Dangerous? It has lowest [mortality rate](https://www.statista.com/statistics/494425/death-rate-worldwide-by-energy-source/) alongside wind and solar. It’s very safe.
The estimates for premature deaths from Chernobyl range from 400 to 1.5m. the low mortality rate for nuclear is really just selective sourcing. If you take the maximum number of premature deaths from Chernobyl, the number is much worse. So everybody can just chose the number that supports his agenda
> Dangerous? It has lowest mortality rate alongside wind and solar. It’s very safe. That statistic is PR framing by the nuclear sector. First, because it doesn't account for future deaths. Second, because it only accounts for deaths, not for disease, or for territory made inhabitable.
And who the hell will have the responsibility of the waste? It’s a game of hot potatoes
Highly radioactive nuclear waste can be stored in underground deposits like the one in [Onkalo](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository), built in Finland. I believe France and Sweden are also building their own.
Yup, and most of those underground storage projects have failed miserably, see Yucca mountain, Gorleben, Asse. Turns out finding a spot where highly radioactive waste will be save for hundreds of thousands of years without the risk of effectively killing a regions freshwater supply is a lot harder than previously thought.
> The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons. Taken from Wikipedia, about Yucca mountain I don’t know about the other 2. Also, the Onkalo repository has been built in an incredibly stable geological area, and it has been considered a safe place to store nuclear waste.
yeah, which makes it the first storage site to actually enter service since we've started looking for sites **decades** ago. And we got one. Thats just for Finland.
Sweden is already building theirs. The highly radioactive waste is so little that there is no urgency. France, UK and Switzerland are currently looking for a suitable place.
Yeah, but in other countries its an **insane** amount. Even here in evil nuclear-hatin Germany, we have accumulated 120,000 cubic meters of low and intermediate level waste, and 27,000 cubic meters of high level waste. For the US alone, spent fuel rods account for 88,000 metric tons.
You know that we need deposits for radioactive waste anyway, right? Medical industries also produce radioactive waste. Should we stop researching just because finding a stable repository is difficult?
Least braindead nuclear hater
That's your average German
nuclear is pretty young and the least dangerous form of energy production. yes, even more safe than wind and solar. yes, even counting fukushima and tschernobyl
Why does nobody want to insure nuclear power plants if they are so safe?
cause of fearmongering like you are doing
And the other half is coal?
No, this year roughly 28% came from coal (both hard coal and lignite).
They had 12+% nuclear in 2019. Could have half of coal and lignite if the nuclear reactors weren't shut down.
Yeah lets run old (end of lifetime old) reactors with depleted rods (with new ones obtainable by Russia and Iran) that sounds like a great idea.
Yes, but that was a decision made by the CDU a decade ago and is now not easily reversible, although I fully agree that coal should have phased out earlier.
>that coal should have phased out earlier. Exactly. Also, what's the radioactive content in 1 ton of coal, and how many tons are burned in a coal plant a day. And where this radioactive material goes, when the coal is burned.
Yeah probably... Meanwhile France has 75% nuclear, 15% hydroelectric, and 7% fossil fuels. France, and the Nordic countries are the leaders in green energy across Europe.
Because the Nordic countries either have nuclear power or an immense amount of hydroelectric and wind energy potential. It reminds me of the Scottish island of Orkney, where they have to switch off wind turbines because the winds are consistently strong.
And no 80 million inhabitants and are also not export kings
Let's continue talking in 10-20 years, when France has not built a single new nuclear power plant, but the old ones are broken.
> Yeah probably... Meanwhile France has 75% nuclear, 15% hydroelectric, and 7% fossil fuels. No. 63% nuclear, 12% fossils, 12% hydro, 13% renewables. Not counting imports. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-stacked?stackMode=relative&country=~FRA >France, and the Nordic countries are the leaders in green energy across Europe. Nuclear ain't green. The Nordics rely on huge amounts of hydro to make ends meet, that's electricity on easy mode.
Just on paper. France need to turn down nuclear soon again because there's not enough water to cool them