I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons:
- Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times. In other words, natural gas imports generate a lot more $ per GWh of energy produced, even if imported from the same country (Russia).
- The reserves of Uranium across the globa are still huge, much of which can be found in (relatively) politically stable places such as Australia and Canada. For natural gas, one is locked into imports from countries such as Russia, Saudi-Arabia (and similar Arab monarchies), Venezuela and Russia for the forseeable future.
I'm not suggesting that investment in renewables should be slowed down, only that coal and gass should be removed BEFORE nuclear. If Germany is able to produce the energy they need from renewables only, and to provide a stable supply, all the power to them.
But to bring up renewables in a discussion about nuclear vs natural gas, is just a diversion tactic (or at best a dilusion).
Oh, btw, I'm Norwegian. My country is making a $100 billion profit from the current energy situation in Europe, just this year, meaning that my household of 4 indirectly profits about $80000 from this in 2022 alone. So I'm not arguing from personal interest....
> I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times
What seems "uninformed, if not dishonest" to me is the argument that fuel price matters here. Imagine this: Your country needs seven doohickeys per year to run. What exactly those doohickeys are is unimportant; the only important thing is that you need then. Russia can provide you with four doohickeys per year. The rest of the world can provide you with only five doohickeys per year, and for many years they won't be able to provide any more than that. So you need at least two doohickeys per year from Russia, no matter what, otherwise your country stops running. So Russia can stop your country from running at any moment. Did you notice how price never entered this discussion?
> The reserves of Uranium across the globa are still huge, much of which can be found in (relatively) politically stable places such as Australia and Canada.
Reserves of uranium matter here much less than enrichment and fuel assembly production capacity. Russia has over 40% of enriched fuel production capacity (as per https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...). Until you build new plants for this, it doesn't matter that you can get natural uranium from Australia or Canada. You won't be able to do anything useful with it (unless your reactor is CANDU).
For Germany's risk, the the price doesn't make a big differencem, should Russia decide to cut off the supply.
As long as the supply is NOT cut off, it matters quite a lot what Germany is paying for it. If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium, the difference is 80 billion euroes less that Russia could spend to keep their war machine running. That's as much as their peacetime yearly military budget.
As for Russia's enrichment capacity, that is something any advanced country could set up, just as several countries have deposites they could start mining. Ones mining and enrichment has started, it could be kept running for as long as needed.
For natural gas, on the other hand, there are fewer good sources. By far the cheapest source is from wherever it can be transported in pipes. Other countries can convert their gas to LNG for transport to Germany, but that also requires expansion of LNG facilities in both ends, and perhaps construction of more LNG ships.
I don't know which take longer, between LNG from other sources or uranium from other sources.
And even when the transfer has been made, natural gas is a more limited resource than uranium, so even if it is purchased from, say, Saudi Arabia, the global supply and demand situation isn't changed much, so Russia will still be able to find buyers for their gas. (For instance, Germany may start to buy up gas that would otherwise be exported to China. If so, China can just buy from Russia.)
This doesn't even start to go into having dependencies on fundamentalist islamic monarchies in the middle east. I would think it would be preferrable for Germany to import their energy from Canada and Australia, countries they that share most of Germany's values.
Finally, with nuclear there is always the option of setting up strategic fuel reserves. This would be analogous to strategic oil reserves, except with massively lower storage costs. Nuclear fuel is stable for 100s of years, and so dense that reserves able to last a few years could probably be fit in a single warehouse (or several small ones):
> If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium
Except that's NOT the choice that Germany is faced with. In the short term, the cheapest way for Germany to cover for any decrease in nuclear generation is to increase her lignite mining, not to buy more gas, which has grown even more expensive. And also notice that this decreases the money Russia would get from 100 billion in your hypothetical example not to 20 billion but rather to 0 billion, all while being even cheaper for Germany.
> As for Russia's enrichment capacity, that is something any advanced country could set up
It would take many years to replace the 46% [1] Russian share of the global enrichment capacity. Maybe more than a few years -- a decade perhaps. After all, this is all highly controlled, specialized equipment. You can't just go and buy it in a supermarket.
> I don't know which take longer, between LNG from other sources or uranium from other sources.
It would absolutely take longer for the world to replace Russian uranium fuel production. They've built is up as a Cold War Project-Manhattan-level strategic project over more than a decade.
> Finally, with nuclear there is always the option of setting up strategic fuel reserves.
As I already responded to someone else, you can't set up a fuel reserve if your expected value of fuel consumption is higher than your expected value of of fuel production (or, acquisition in this case, really).
> It would absolutely take longer for the world to replace Russian uranium fuel production. They've built is up as a Cold War Project-Manhattan-level strategic project over more than a decade.
As I said, I don't know. (EDIT, meaning that I don't know, not that I dispute your claim. It would be nice to have actual numbers.) It does also take years to set up transportation capacity for LNG, including the tankers, terminals and other infrastructure.
Anyway, had the west realized this exposure for real in 2014, I would have expected that at least some increased capacity would be available outside of Russia already, with an increase in capacity every month as we go forward. And had the output of that capacity been put into strategic reserves, one would have some level of reserve while building up more capacity.
What it looks like from your link, is that there was an initative started last year to reduce dependancy on Russian fuel. I suppose time will tell how long it takes to reach reasonable production volumes.
And one thing is obvious. Storing and transporting nuclear fuel is orders of magnutudes cheaper than storing and transporting natural gas.
3 reasons, I suspect - if someone wants an enormous stockpile of uranium fuel they can probably do that. The volumes check out - uranium is very dense and so will not take up much space. I'm not sure if it has a shelf life, but being a rock I expect something can be sorted out.
I can't pretend to know how feasible it is in practice, but long term strategic uranium stockpiles should be doable. Long enough to weather any reasonable war. Much, much more doable than trying to store a decade of nat gas.
I hope you noticed the news about Gazprom possibly intentionally keeping gas reserves in Germany low for months before the Russian invasion in preparation of said invasion. You can't make a strategic stockpile if your potential enemy is your supplier and preventively doesn't allow you make those stockpiles in the first place so that you didn't have this way out.
You're misjudging the differences between uranium and gas. Transporting and building a uranium reserve would be relatively easy; maintaining a 10 year stockpile and importing from Canada, Australia or Kazakhstan via a circuitous route are all feasible.
This doesn't work with natural gas because they needed a lot of it and moving it around is capital intensive. The situations are completely different. The energy densities here are wildly dissimilar, and that matters a lot for the economic of building a stockpile.
> You're misjudging the differences between uranium and gas.
So do you.
> Transporting and building a uranium reserve would be relatively easy; maintaining a 10 year stockpile and importing from Canada, Australia or Kazakhstan via a circuitous route are all feasible.
See, that's the problem. One of the differences between natural gas and uranium is that (outside of CANDU reactors) you can't use the uranium "as is". To use uranium for pretty much anything useful, you need certain high-tech facilities. By production capacity, almost half of those facilities (according to [1], it's 46 percent) is in Russia.
The way things are, you can't build a stockpile if the expected value of uranium fuel production outside of Russia is lower than the expected value of uranium fuel consumption outside of Russia, which I believe is currently the case. As long as this remains to be a case, any stockpile will dwindle, not grow.
You could turn that on its head. Had Germany created uranium stockpiles in 2014, enough to last, say, 5 years, they would not be vulnerable to this tactic in the first place.
Considering that you can't use raw uranium but need fuel assemblies, you'd need a replacement manufacturer of fuel assemblies, not just a uranium stockpile. But of course Germany was scheduled to shut down its nuclear power plants in 2022-ish anyway so a stockpile would have been largely meaningless.
Pretty sure you can have your stockpiles pre-assebled, or close enough that the final step is trivial.
Anyway, my argument i built on the premise that Germany should never have shut down their nuclear power plants (except when they truely are "spent") and instead built a large number of new ones.
If their nuclear capacity was about the same as the French, it would make a lot of sense to have a strategic stockpile of ready-to-use fuel, both in case supply is restricted for political reasons and because it would serve as a hedge against price fluctuations.
Or, they could just shut down their nuclear plants and the problem with nuclear fuel stockpile goes away as well. And in fact, this is vastly easier to accomplish, and exactly the thing they're already doing.
If you scroll up the thread a bit, the context was that someone claimed that Germany would be less dependent on Germany if they had kept more of their nuclear power plants. That is something they might have figured out in 2014.
Going as heavy on natural gas as they have over the last generation, more or less ensures that they are in Russia's pocket. Shutting down nuclear plants does not make that better. In fact, I argue, it makes it worse.
Your refutation of the possibility of to use Nuclear power to gain independence of Russian energy seems to depend on German inability to achieve indepencende of Russian fuel by setting up a stockpile(1).
Which in turn is justified by claiming that the stockpile would not be needed, since they would shut down their nuclear plants(2).
Which is justified by (1), which is justified by (2) and so on.
My argument is that, had Germany decided in 2014 to increase, rather than decrease their use of nuclear power, with the aim to reduce dependence on Russia, it could be done. But given that, they would have to start looking for (possibly in cooperation with their allies) other sources of fuel to really become independent, in other words, set up agreements to buy fuel from countries like Australia and Canada, on top of whatever fuel was being bought from Russia before 2022.
Basically, my argument requires BOTH of these steps to be taken:
- Decide to keep or increase energy production from nuclear
- Decide to work towards independence of Russia by funding alternative sources + by putting any extra fuel they purchase into a strategic stockpile.
(Edit: formatting.)
These are clearly decisions that were available to Germany (as a country, provided the public had been primed to support them). I don't find the spot in your argument that refutes any of them, without already assuming that the other is impossible.
Also, I don't find where in your argument, in what way these decisions, if taken together, would NOT ensure that Germany would have more energy production capacity in 2022 than they have now.
> Your refutation of the possibility of to use Nuclear power to gain independence of Russian energy seems to depend on German inability to achieve indepencende of Russian fuel by setting up a stockpile(1).
No, my refutation hinged on 1) the fact that German nuclear power is NOT a substitute for the vast majority of German uses of natural gas (chemical and other industry, residential heaters -- neither of which is near-term replaceable with nuclear power without massive investments in electrolysis), and 2) the fact that German nuclear power has the cheapest substitute in form of unused capacity of coal plants (which recently massively dropped in their capacity factor) and accelerated expansion of renewable generation. There is no circularity in this that I see. 1) means that keeping or expanding the nuclear fleet does not decrease dependency on Russian gas, and 2) means that ditching it does not increase dependency on anything else coming from Russia.
So ditching the German nuclear fleet has no downside in terms of reducing dependency on Russia. In fact ditching the German nuclear fleet might somewhat reduce the dependency on Russia on part of the remaining global users of nuclear power, owing to the reduction of uranium fuel consumption in light of the fact that Russia possesses 46% of world's uranium enrichment capacity -- any enriched uranium on the global market that Germany would have to use in their reactors could be used by someone else at that poitnt, with less money paid for enriched uranium flowing into Russia.
> My argument is that, had Germany decided in 2014 to increase, rather than decrease their use of nuclear power, with the aim to reduce dependence on Russia, it could be done.
They could have certainly acted in that direction with such an aim, but since such actions would not have lead to achieving this aim (see above), it would have been a completely irrational course of action.
Only a tiny sliver is for non-energy, and that part could easily be purchased from other countries.
In Norway, a large percentage of heating used to come from oil, but in 2020 any fossil fuel for residential heating was banned. As long as the power is cheap, electric heating is affordable. And if the electricity is slightly less cheap, heating is still affordable if one installs a heat pump (even a cheap air-to-air pump helps a lot).
And even if you were correct in your claim that a large part of the natural gas could not be replaced by nuclear (which is just lack of imagination), your argument would be flawed.
From the link I sent, only 2% of the consumption is non-energy use, but even if that were 50%, reducing dependency by 50% is still a big deal.
> The vast majority of German natural gas use, is for the energy.
You are aware that heating is energy? Residential burners, industrial burners, etc. So this does in no way contradict what I said. Still, none of this gas consumption is directly substitutable by electricity without massive infrastructure changes, not even by nuclear electricity.
> As long as the power is cheap
In Germany, it's not, so there's that.
> And if the electricity is slightly less cheap, heating is still affordable if one installs a heat pump (even a cheap air-to-air pump helps a lot).
That's a part of the massive infrastructure changes that I'm talking about. I've already mentioned elsewhere the 2010 and 2012 EU directives that will make this happen on a timescale of decades as the building stock is progressively replaced, but you can't do this on a timescale of years.
> And even if you were correct in your claim that a large part of the natural gas could not be replaced by nuclear (which is just lack of imagination), your argument would be flawed.
It's not "a lack of imagination". I've never said these uses can't be replaced -- in fact we know exactly how these uses will be replaced (natural gas in chemistry with electrolytic hydrogen, natural gas in heating with passive houses, etc.), so no need to invoke "imagination". The problem at hand is that you can't do this transition on a timescale of a war (...and in the middle of a pandemic, and during a recession, and with a famine coming). This will not be done in months, or even years. Think two decades instead. So this will help us deal with the climate issues, but won't help with the war.
> From the link I sent, only 2% of the consumption is non-energy use, but even if that were 50%, reducing dependency by 50% is still a big deal.
It would, except this has nothing to do with keeping or ditching nuclear plants. This reduction would have to come from the fields where natural gas is being used and neither keeping not ditching nuclear plants would affect the success of such gas-saving measures.
Yes. My house, that was heated by oil 2 years ago, is heated by electricity today.
> In Germany, it's not, so there's that.
Because Germany has underinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin.
> It would, except this has nothing to do with keeping or ditching nuclear plants.
If Germany had kept their nuclear plants electricity plants (and ideally built a number of new ones) electricity in Europe would be cheaper. Thats just supply and demand.
> The problem at hand is that you can't do this transition on a timescale of a war
I agree you cannot transition in 2 months. I talked about starting in 2014. Shutting down the plants this year is only the culiminatino of a chain of bad decisions about energy.
But I suppose in 2014, the psychological damage was already done. It appears like Germany had already decided to get rid of Nuclear after 2011 / Fukushima. This seems to be driven by fear, more than anything.
Which I suppose is the real problem. This never was about making ration decisions about energy security, being dependent on Russia, etc. All along, this was about fear of "nuclear". The rest just looks like rationalization.
Meanwhile, energy prices have gone up all over Europe, since Germany is only the biggest country to have underinvested in electricity production. Even countries that produce an excess of electricity, like Norway, have the same prices. And believe me, ACER is getting really unpopular here, I would not be surprised if Norway is out of ACER by winter.
> Yes. My house, that was heated by oil 2 years ago, is heated by electricity today
Good, so you see how the argument that only 2% of natural gas in Germany are not used for energy applications is irrelevant for the issue of replacing residential and industrial heat sources. These are major energy applications alright -- ones that can't be readily switched to electricity without major infrastructure transitions -- which are already taking place but can't be sped up 100x on a whim.
> Because Germany has underinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin.
No, actually it's largely because Germany overinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin. Their renewable investments, just like the renewable investments in the neighboring Czech Republic, led -- rather than trailed -- the recent decreases of prices of renewable generation equipment around 2010. As a result of this, Germany has to spend much more money than they would have had to, had they waited just a few years. This made their electricity around six Euro cents per kWh more expensive. (Investments do have to be repaid, after all.)
> I agree you cannot transition in 2 months. I talked about starting in 2014.
Germany started with the transition seriously around 2005. It still takes time, and also isn't a thing that happens at a constant rate because the industrial landscape is evolving. As things such as PV panels, wind turbines, or heat pumps get more affordable, their rate of installation increases.
> If Germany had kept their nuclear plants electricity plants (and ideally built a number of new ones) electricity in Europe would be cheaper.
Debatable, judging from the recent events in the European nuclear industry (Hinkley Point-C, Olkiluoto-3, etc.). The mandated feed-in tariff for HP-C electricity is now more than double than what a wind power plant would deliver. It's inflation-adjusted, so for example around now the electricity straight from the HP-C plant should be worth around 14 Euro cents per kWh, whereas for example new German PV auctions take place at under 5 Euro cents per kWh. And European wind power as well has similar price levels to the latter nowadays.
> But I suppose in 2014, the psychological damage was already done. It appears like Germany had already decided to get rid of Nuclear after 2011 / Fukushima. This seems to be driven by fear, more than anything.
It does not "appear" that "Germany had already decided to get rid of nuclear after 2011/Fukushima". They had mandated the shutdown in binding law almost ten years before Fukushima, so Fukushima had nothing to do with this.
> Meanwhile, energy prices have gone up all over Europe, since Germany is only the biggest country to have underinvested in electricity production. Even countries that produce an excess of electricity, like Norway, have the same prices.
You know, that just might have something to do with energy trading across Europe. The fact that Norway's electricity rates are increasing is a sign of healthy market, because it shows that arbitrage works.
> Good, so you see how the argument that only 2% of natural gas in Germany are not used for energy applications is irrelevant for the issue of replacing residential and industrial heat sources.
Actually the opposite. If I personally could switch away from heating my house with fossil fuels, so could Germans. In principle, it could happen over a few months (depending on the number of electric ovens available in the market, the capacity of the grid, etc), but it is cheaper to do over some number of years.
Obviously, this would cost some money. But basic electric ovens are quite cheap, and Germany is not a poor country. Also, since I already paid that cost personally, I'm not super-inclined to feel sorry for them....
> No, actually it's largely because Germany overinvested in electricity plants that cannot be shut down by Putin.
At best, I would agree that Germany has chosen to switch to expensive energy production. The net output (as opposed to theoretical peak capacity) of renewables is still only about the same as renewables was in 1990, so that is not super-impressive, from a global warming perspective.
I don't believe that the 1990 nuclear industry was as dependent on Russian fuel, as it is today. Har Germany continued to produce electricity in their nuclear plants at the same level as 1990, it would have had the same effect on global warming as their "investment" in renewables have had so far. And any dependence that was created on Russia over this period, was by choice, and could have been reversed.
> but you can't do this on a timescale of years.
Norway made the decision to ban fossil fuels for heating in 2017, effective from 2020. Granted, it affected a smaller (but not insignificant) part of the population. But if there is a will, there is a way.
> You know, that just might have something to do with energy trading across Europe. The fact that Norway's electricity rates are increasing is a sign of healthy market, because it shows that arbitrage works.
I agree. In principle, it is not different from Norway paying full price (and then some) for gasoline/diesel. But they/we are used to to the low prices on electricity, from when local consumption was prioritized. Also, especially after the ban on oil/gas for heating, some feel tricked. So the public reaction is similar to what I imagine it would be in Germany, had Germany stopped all gas imports from Russia overnight. The government may be forced out of the common market before next winter, because of this.
> The problem at hand is that you can't do this transition on a timescale of a war
Maybe I'm being too harsh. My measuring stick is from my own (Norwegian) experience. Britian is not doing much better than Germany, and I would not expect countries like Hungary, the Baltic states, Poland etc to have the economy to turn this around quickly.
Also, Norway is obviously spoiled. We are 100% self-sufficient with renewable electricity, AND we make really good money from exporting oil and gas. We never really had to do the hard choices. (Also, Norway has still had high emissions, due to cold climate and low population density making both heating and transportation very energy intensive, as well as emissions from the oil industry)
France, though, has significantly lower CO2 emissions than Germany, and has had that since forever, even without having the resources that Norway possess. All due to nuclear, and they do it without making massively expensive investments into renewables. More for less, in other words.
So I suppose I predjudiced (postively, but maybe unfairly) when it comes to Germany. I generally expect Germany to be best-in-class when it comes efficiency and rationality, and especially implementation.
So when, in a case like this, it seems like German policies are irrational, especially when compared to French policies, it pops out as an outlier (to me, as an outsider to both Germany and France). I suppose there are good ways to explain this, based on local culture and politics, that go back more than 30 years, maybe all the way back to when France needed their nuclear industry for military use. I suppose these differences, when seen from the inside, are almost invisible because they may be taken for granted.
Maybe, from the German perspective, it is an establish fact that nuclear power is "bad" or "dirty" somehow, while fossil fuel consumption is relatively more acceptable. Maybe the Russian threat is not felt the same way that some other countries feel it. Maybe there is guilt, or maybe the taboo around annexing neighbours is not as strong.
Anyway, maybe best to end this thread. Thanks for staying reasonably polite, and good luck going forward!
And now we replay an earlier argument on if Germany would have continued with the renewable transition, we wouldn't need any stockpile oof gas or uran from Russia.
I'm not suggesting that investment in renewables should be slowed down, only that coal and gass should be removed BEFORE nuclear. If Germany is able to produce the energy they need from renewables only, and to provide a stable supply, all the power to them.
But to bring up renewables in a discussion about nuclear vs natural gas, is just a diversion tactic (or at best a dilusion).
Oh, btw, I'm Norwegian. My country is making a $100 billion profit from the current energy situation in Europe, just this year, meaning that my household of 4 indirectly profits about $80000 from this in 2022 alone. So I'm not arguing from personal interest....
[1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...