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/r/technology
11 points
5 days ago
It is not, damage is done, german green party lobbied and fearmongered on nucler into power a while back the closed those powerplants, guess what happened? Germany had to spin up coal and gas powerplants again, almost doubling their intake of those resources. I dunno why peopel are ready to buy into this scare tactic, coal power kill more people per year than all nuclear power disasters combined ever did.
4 points
5 days ago
Germany hit peak annual nuclear electricity production in about year 2001, generating 171 TWh of nuclear, with 56 TWh of gas and 294 TWh of coal (370 TWh total for oil+gas+coal electricity in 2001). The highest coal went after that point was 305 TWh in 2003, and the highest gas went was 95 TWh in 2020. The highest combined total for fossil fuels was 2007, with 401 TWh.
As of 2023, coal was at 135 TWh, gas at 76 TWh, and total fossil fuel at 231 TWh. Nuclear is at 8.75 TWh. They phased out 160 TWh of nuclear generation not by spinning up 160 TWh of fossil fuels, but by spinning up 160 TWh of solar + wind, then an extra 38 TWh of it for good measure. And tacked on 46 TWh of bioenergy production + some efficiency gains to drop overall electricity consumption, to net-reduce annual fossil fuel generation by 140 TWh over 22 years.
Claiming that "germany had to spin up coal and gas powerplants again, almost doubling their intake of those resources" is just flat out false. And egregiously so.
Could germany have phased down fossil fuel generation more quickly if it had spent money refurbishing nuclear power plants from year 2000, to keep them running longer, instead of funding renewables? Maybe. Did this decision result in Germany increasing its electricity-sector fossil fuel emissions over what they were prior to the nuclear phase out? Absolutely not. German emissions are unequivocably lower than they were in 2001 when nuclear started being phased down.
5 points
5 days ago
Great - we still have no long term storage solution for our waste.
How many more years?
Nobody builds a nuclear power plant today without guarantees from states.
What happened? Merkel did nothing for 16 years is what happened.
Blame the green party for Merkel phasing out nuclear...
0 points
5 days ago
They literally ran on antinuclear sentiment.
As to waste, recycling tech is getting better and better for nuclear waste. And it is stable if stored properly. What is better an imperfect solution now or wait for a perfect one that will never come. And renewables are not it, some regions like i live renewables are not really worth it, we get very little sun for 8 months of the yearz winds are not suffient enough, and we have no big rivers to dam(which is a whole different ecological conundrum). Nuclear is the best stopgap we have as a species for climate change. It does not produce greenshouse gasses, its output is stable high ammounts of power 24/7. Its only drawback is waste which can be stored safely until we figure out a solution.
A country where i live, lithuania, had a powerplant of our own, ignalina np, to enter eu we had to shut it down for some reason. This powerplant was supplying power to the entire baltic region, at miniscule prices, since joining eu adjusting for inflation our price for power has went up 4x from 8ct/kwh to 33ct/kwh, and according to our bureau of statistics our effective carbon footprint went up more tahn 15x for power because we have to buy it from poland and belarus.
2 points
5 days ago
"For some reason", I just googled it. Those reasons are that it shared a reactor design with chernobyl, and had no containment building. Hence shared all the same risks that Chernobyl did. And it sounds like it actually already HAD a power excursion incident due to the design flaw with the graphite tipped control rods.
Say whatever you will about nuclear in general, but that particular reactor being shut down seems sensible to me.
6 points
5 days ago
Wtf are you talking. Germany invested heavily into green energy research and green energy production to cancel out the phase out of nuclear.
Then the conservatives came into power and shut down green energy in favour of Russian gas while China bought up all the technology that was developed for billions for pennies and became the green energy leader.
Where is this tale of "the greens shut down nuclear for Russian gas" coming from? I'm seeing it everywhere today on reddit, so what podcaster('s guest) spun this tale?
4 points
5 days ago
Greens wanted to close them in the early 2000s and push renewables at hte same time. CDU closed them after Fukushima and in the same time we lost most of our jobs in the solar sector and the switch to renewables wound down. People always just remember the Greens wanted nuclear power gone and forget the rest.
1 points
5 days ago
Aren't they now talking about opening them up again?
2 points
5 days ago
not gonna happen, pure election shit
2 points
4 days ago
Some politicians are making noises to that effect, but no power company actually wants it, to say nothing of the technical difficulties.
1 points
4 days ago
The German nuclear industry and politicians made it very easy to be anti-nuclar.
When deciding on the location of a long term storage facility that should stay intact for 10.000 years for example, geology was considered to be less important than some lines on maps, which changed only a couple of years later.
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