There are also many institutes (e.g IDW) constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc.
These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows.
And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive AND highest CO2 energy in Europe.
In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end.
Now we are reliant on russian gas and the politicians still want to keep closing the remaining three nuclear power plants.
The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.
> And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive
Do you have any sources? Last time I checked, Germany and France weren't that far apart, if you remove taxes out of the costs. The thing is that Germany has a lot of Taxes that have nothing todo with how we generate the electricity. I.e. 90% of the electricity tax (Stromsteuer) goes into the government pension fund.
Technically, you're still not removing taxes from the equation, because the state owned nuclear plants in France are also funded by taxes, it's just not taxes that are added to the cost of units of electricity.
Which actually makes sense, if you have a high upfront cost, constant output source iike nuclear, taxing each individual unit makes no sense since the marginal cost is effectively zero up till you need to build a new plant. Whereas if you burn coal or gas, you want to incentivise people to cut back for cost, carbon and pollution reasons.
An even more sensible approach would be to tax the carbon directly and charge more for peak electricity since that contributes more to the infrastructure requirements, which I guess both countries will already be moving towards as is the current trend in most places.
Yes, taxes and subsidies distort the actual costs of energy production. But if you look at my example, 90% of the Stromsteuer (tax on your energy bill as a household) don't go into funding of energy production, but to stabilize the (very broken) german mandatory pension/retirment system. But yes, one could argue that it is just moving around taxes in the government spending household.
The Stromsteuer ist only 5% of the price. It depends on your definition of taxes. The EEG-Umlage alone reached 6.5ct/kwh and directly paid for renewables. It‘s now taken out of the price, so the real price of energy is higher than what is paid by the consumer. The EEG Umlage is now hidden in and paid for by a special fund („Energie- und Klimafonds“)
Jeez, I know electricity prices in Europe are higher than in the US generally, but a 6.5c per kwh tax would have been a rate of around 66% at the beginning of 2021 when it was 1.20 USD/EUR and the average US residential rate was ~13c/kwh.
Yes, rates can be much higher. We pay 37c for instance at the moment.
On the other hand: To have higher energy prices provides incentives for less use and must be part of an intermediate strategy to bring down CO2 emissions.
Or it's an incentive to use cheaper energy. In my area gas is cheaper than electricity, but policy tries to push folks to use electricity. It would make more sense to drive down the cost of electricity so that it is the economic choice as well as the environmental one.
You're saying that there is a transfer from nuclear to renewables of 6.5 cents/kWh for every kWh nuclear generates, or a net market distortion of 13c/kWh between the two (using the tenuous assumption of roughly equivalent capacities between the two sectors)?
That's more than I pay in the US in total per kWh for electricity, generated, distributed, and taxed.
Germany jumped into solar really early and it's very far north so it’s not that relevant when considering todays tradeoffs.
41.3 gigawatts (GW) by the end of 2016 was frankly excessive though it helped PV get much cheaper. Unfortunately, Germany now stuck with these huge agreed upon subsides for another decade.
They also "pulled out" of solar early. I have idea how anyone can make sense of German policies. They seem to be working solely on the basis of emotion. The outcome is a disastrous policy that created one of the highest energy prices for consumers for no good reason.
The Greens in Germany seem to be hell bent on de-industrializing Germany. They hate nuclear power and they hate all fossil fuels, but want to buy fracking LNG from the USA and fire up brown coal plants that were previously shut down to shove it to Putin. The outcome seems to be mass bankruptcies in what seems to be the social fabric of Germany, while getting a lot less energy for the same price.
For accusing others of being highly emotional, this post is incredibly biased and doesn't hold a fact check.
- the Greens are the party most opposed to brown coal out of all German parties.
- Gas is far less emissions intense than most other forms of fossil fuels, so it is a good transitional source of energy.
- Germanies nuclear plants were built around 40 years ago, with a lifetime in mind of 40 years. The idea of arguing they can run longer because nothing happened in the last 40 years is preposterous, and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how industry works. Not only are the designs lacking essential security features, every single part was produced with 40 year lifetime in mind.
- the three plants that where built in 87 are going to continue to run for now.
Facts are still facts and reality is still reality. The greens are calling for a reactivation of brown coal power plants[1]. Literally the dirtiest of all energy(including coal).
You can bring up your "facts" about Germany's nuclear power plants all you want. But the green policies are part of the reason why the investment in nuclear was halted and on top of that the German Taxpayer had to foot a massive payout to nuclear plant operators for the premature exit. [2]
> - Germanies nuclear plants were built around 40 years ago, with a lifetime in mind of 40 years. The idea of arguing they can run longer because nothing happened in the last 40 years is preposterous, and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how industry works. Not only are the designs lacking essential security features, every single part was produced with 40 year lifetime in mind.
It's normal to do a general maintenance (with upgrades to recent security standard) at the end of projected lifetime and then run it for another 40 years. It's absolute - economically speaking - bullshit to destroy a mostly-good nuclear power plant. It's not like the reactor core is the only thing there, anyways - even replacing it would be much better than tearing the place down.
The worst thing is - you lose experts, and they don't train new experts. And then there's no one to bring the nuclear power plant up again, or build a new one. Lost technology...
That's simply false, shutting down a nuclear power plant is extremely fucking expensive. Operators would love to cheaply extend the lifespan, but maintenance costs get so horrific over time it's simply not an option.
It's like trying to keep an old car on the road, except a few critical components are highly radioactive.
Sorry, but Die Grüne (The Greens) in Germany lost the plot a long time ago. Where they are in power for a long time, for example in BaWu, they are basically the CDU but greenwashed. "Sie kennen mich" anyone?
The subsidy was focused on developing a domestic manufacturing sector. Unfortunately rather than pay the subsidy at at instill they bound future customers with it which hid just how much money was involved.
> constantly pumping out papers that conclude nuclear energy has highest costs, highest danger, will leave unsolvable toxic waste problems, renewable energy is extremely cheap, building enough storage is no problem etc.
Isn't your choice of telling them false based purely on political agenda? Same happens on other side of the camp, both believe their science is actual science.
Flying is scientifically a well understood and safe thing. Still its the FAA that makes the rules, and engineering that needs to produce robust and reliable systems, and still planes fall out of the sky sometimes..
Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...
So what does "scientifically...much solavable problem" in practice really mean? Worlds apart..
> Scientifically we already proofed that fusion works, which would be the solution for a lot...
There is no evidence that fusion is a solution to any energy problems. The central problem of fusion power is that reactions consume more energy than they produce.
That's currently a problem, but I don't think it's the central problem. The central problem for DT is some combination of inherent complexity and very low volumetric power density.
> Scientifically, nuclear waste disposal is very much solvable problem.
No it is not.
There is no place on Earth that we know is geologically stable for the time periods required We have no way of knowing what society will be like ten thousand years from now, let alone 100,000 years. How do we communicate with those people bout the danger of what we left behind?
Tectonic plates don't move nearly quick enough to be a concern in the span of 100k years. A spot square in the middle of a plate is going to be safe from earthquakes for millions of years.
And not to mention, how does ground vibration bring sometimes buried under 500 meters of solid rock back onto the surface? Earthquakes shake the ground, they don't dig deep boreholes.
You’re incorrect about the middle of tectonic plates being safe from earthquakes by definition. Locating naively built skyscrapers in New Madrid, MO, for example, would be a bad idea. [1]
On a geological timescale, tectonic plates occasionally rift down the middle, both successfully (East Africa) and unsuccessfully (a failed plate rift produced the Great Lakes).
With that said, identifying strata that are going to remain seismically stable for a looooong time is a solved problem, and earthquakes generally damage only those things not attached to the (moving) earth.
Yet, all the attempts to store nuclear fuel underground in Germany proved so catastrophic that they had to scrap all of them and restart the selection process.
There are water around mines that will be toxic to human life until the sun collapse and the earth burns up. People will have to be aware of those dangers for as long human exist, unless humans mutate enough to tolerate lead and sulfur in their fresh water.
How should we communicate to those people of those dangers?
We can filter it out, but unless people know that the water is toxic then they might still be harmed. How do we inform the people of the future of the dangers that contaminated fresh water has, and how do we do that for billions of years into the future?
In some cases, yes, in other it seems that they are sink areas that are simply constantly being nurtured with migrant animals from the surroundings (Some birds for example). Is complex.
And we need to remember that some people was poisoned just a few months ago for digging trenches in Chernobyl in the middle of a war. The danger is still there forty years later.
Poisoned is a relative term. The rates of cancers and deaths from the Chernobyl disaster varies by an incredible amount depending on what source you look at.
Well no, we have plenty of data that shows in reality, nuclear is the safest (lowest deaths per TWh generated [1]), among the lowest-carbon intensity (lower than solar, higher than wind) [2] and with seawater extraction has the potential of being renewable.
Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
So-called environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.
Besides this being studies for which other studiest exist the same, we also learned in the pandemic that "deaths" cannot be the sole metric (however you want to interpret that).
And seawater extraction is as renewable as CO2-scrubbing the atmosphere would allow us to go on with burnign coal - both would equally not scale to needs with current technology, so what?
Why wouldn't seawater extraction scale? There's 4 billion tons of uranium in the sea (a 60,000 year supply at current usage levels), and 100 trillion tons of uranium below that from which it's replenished as it is extracted.
Supplying a single 1 GW(e) burner reactor with seawater uranium would require a 170 square kilometer absorber field on the continental shelf. That's much worse power/area than solar, and just slightly higher than the power/area of an offshore wind field.
Of course use of breeder reactors could extend this, but with breeders terrestrial U resources are adequate for a very long time.
Sir. There's a practically unlimited quantity of uranium available to meet our energy needs now and for as long as humans wander this rock. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best. A huge reason breeder reactors aren't used right now is that there's plenty of land-based uranium already and fuel is not a concern. So much so that stretching it with breeders doesn't really matter, and as a percentage of the cost of generated electricity the uranium input barely registers. By the time we need to dip into the renewable water-based sources, we'll long since have been carbon-free. It'll scale just fine. Stop worrying about problems that won't matter for 10-100,000 years. We've gotta clear the century first.
There is a pratically unlimited quantity if cost is no object. But for cost to be no object, breeder reactors are needed. For burner reactors, fuel cost will begin to be seriously affected rather quickly if we try to supply a 100% nuclear world economy with only terrestrial U sources. That economy would go through in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year to supply the current world average primary energy demand of 18 TW (about 6000 3 MW(th) reactors.) This could exhaust known terrestrial uranium resources (not proven reserves) in less than a decade.
Breeders, as I said, would greatly extend the terrestrial U resource, both by getting 100x as much energy per unit of natural uranium, and by allowing resources 100x as dilute to be economically exploited.
The safety of nuclear assumes no nuclear accidents.
Also, at the low deaths/TWh of renewables and nuclear w.o. accidents, the "cost of deaths" (at the $9M/statistical life that the NRC uses) is swamped by the direct cost of the produced energy. So renewables continue to beat new nuclear on the cost front, w. cost of deaths added in.
The safety of any power source projects past performance onto future performance. This is a tautology, and not really relevant as we have 80 years of experience and nuclear provides 20% of US power. It provides almost 40% of Canada's electricity. 10% of the world's electricity. We have plenty of samples necessary to make an informed projection.
The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low. Just ask Ontario. [1] There is a large cap ex cost at the start, but you can amortize it over 80 years - whereas solar and wind has to be replaced every 20-30.
Nuclear prices in all externalities in its cost assessments due to the onslaught of attacks whereas other energy prices in almost nothing. Coal kills about 100 people per TWh, and at the same $9M NRC cost, coal should cost about $1/kWh.
> The direct cost of produced energy is very low with nuclear - super low.
Only if you ignore the amortization of the cost of financing and building the nuclear power plant. That's fine if the plant is provided by the Nuclear Fairy; not so fine in the real world if we're talking about building new nuclear plants that have to be paid for.
Some things are expensive - more expensive - but we should do them anyways because they're the right thing to do. Generally I refer to the 'nuclear fairy' as the government, whose job it is in my opinion, to make sure we do the right thing even when the market isn't interested.
You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free". That's true at the individual level. It's not true at the level of the whole society. And it's that latter level that matters when asking if nuclear power makes sense.
It's hard to see how wasting resources and, all else being equal, doing something the much more expensive way would be "the right thing to do". If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.
> You are engaging in the egregious fallacy of "if the government pays for it, it's free".
No, I'm not.
A role of government in my opinion is to facilitate providing services and creating infrastructure in the public interest which might not make market economic sense at the time we need it - if it is a better outcome for the citizenry. You're welcome to disagree but there's no fallacy there. I never said it was free, I said it was more expensive - but the government should do it anyways because it will make us better off. Like the post office and the EPA.
There's a reason in going to the moon, JFK never said that “we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not just because they are easy, but because they are the cheapest thing we can possibly do, and if it starts to look like it's cheaper or easier to be sitting on the couch then too bad so sad, to the couch we shall return!"
He said it was "because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
> If nuclear is too expensive than a renewable solution, too bad so sad.
Right no. I don't believe in that. Again, nuclear is renewable, this much is basically indisputable. I believe that a better solution can be government funded in line with the charter of any world government, be it a western democracy or the PRC. I do not believe market viability is the be all and end all in this here world. I believe that attitude would have left us living as hunter-gatherers. I do not believe the cheapest solution is the only solution we should advocate for or pursue, period.
We deserve better and should demand better than your position.
They can beat nuclear right now -- you get more CO2 reduction per $ from adding renewables than you do from adding nuclear. And you get it sooner. Little or no storage is required. By the time storage becomes necessary, the economic environment (price as a function of time) on the grid will be so hostile to new nuclear that there will be no sense even trying to pretend nuclear makes sense.
You get more CO2 reduction until intermittency or geopolitical issues require you to bring coal plants back online to address energy shortfalls, like with Germany. You'd need an order of magnitude more renewables and a huge grid expansion to even remotely come close to solving energy unreliability in Germany, and even then you'll still have some issues. CO2 reduction is not the only goal, power stability is important.
When you need storage, the residual demand is highly intermittent. Coal would serve this rather poorly (and nuclear even more so). Gas would be more likely. However, at that point there are wild swings in the price of power across each day (and possibly across seasons), making storage quite attractive, and it would be rolled out.
If your objection is that storage would not be rolled out instantaneously, I will ask you to try to be more serious. Nuclear isn't rolled out even that fast.
You can make all the theoretical arguments you like, but the empirical data (California, Germany, and more) disagrees with your conclusion. Perhaps you should consider a more serious argument that actually agrees with the current evidence.
What? Experience in Germany and California is completely consistent with what I was saying. Of course natural gas without sufficient CO2 charges will continue to cover intermittency, especially when there's a great deal of already installed gas capacity whose capital cost is sunk.
Why is Germany reopening it's coal plants if not to make up for the intermittency problems of renewables?
If intermittency issues caused storage to be quite attractive, why hasn't storage already been rolled out across Germany and California?
Neither if these claims agrees with what happened in these two cases. Any electrical engineer could have told you storage is needed before decommissioning nuclear in favour of renewables.
> environmentalists are advocating removing this capacity without accounting for the fact its replacement will be coal, oil and gas.
Could you identify any broadly accepted environmental analysis that says this? It's easy to make accusaiont
> Waste disposal is a solved problem: you put the spicy rocks back where they came from.
The waste rocks are not at all like the ones removed from the ground, in critical ways (radioactivity). Who says anything about putting them back in the original mines? Why would the original mines happen to be suitable for nuclear waste storage?
I agree with more nuclear but blasting waste (at least highly radioactive) to space is a problem as there's always a risk the rocket explodes and spreads the radiation on earth. At least I've always understood that's the objection and seems to me reasonable. Yucca mountain type solutions seem more palatable.
If you can encapsulate the pellets to the point that they can survive getting blown out of orbit, catching fire and raining down over the human population without causing any harm - you can encapsulate them and throw them into Yucca Mountain and save the whole exiting earth step.
Except no, those are not the same thing. Stuff in the repository, for example, is exposed to a much higher cumulative radiation dose, which causes huge and unacceptable changes in many materials.
I'm not sure that's relevant to the broader argument I am making. Don't blast waste into space. It carries with it dramatically higher costs - and drastically higher risks. It's completely untenable according to every study and paper on the matter.
Again, selecting a geographic area away from humans and providing sufficient demarcation is dramatically safer than putting it into a rocket and flying it up into orbit over humans. If you disagree, cite a source on its feasibility - and one on the lack of feasibility of deep geological sequestration. Let's not shoot from the hip on this one. I know I haven't found any.
It's untenable with current launch vehicles. Do you think current launch vehicles are the sine qua non of launcher technology, for centuries into the future? We don't have to shoot stuff into space right this moment.
Despite his Twitter account, Musk is not the savior for everything. However, maybe he would like to be blasted into space on the first journey to Proxima Centuri? If anyone can do it, he can!
Still nuclear is finished everywhere (or on the way out except in China) and won't come back from the grave. It is like asking for cars from the 70ties to return.
Isn't that exactly what Tesla just did? The electric car was of course the 'car of the 70s' until it was the car of the 2020's.
Defeatism never solved everything, and China building hundreds of reactors might just be the shot in the arm to get things back on track. The big loss will be that it's these Chinese designs the world will use instead of Western designs.
You fell into the same trap. You linked 2 studies. Other side could link 2 studies with very different conclusion. We should understand it is fundamentally a political issue, and both side shouldn't hide behind 2 links to support them.
I didn't fall into the trap. Objective reality isn't political. The total number of people killed in nuclear accidents divided by TWh generated is pretty objective.
Unfortunately despite the track record nuclear won't make a revival. The planning cycles for new plants are just too long. Renewables will yet again half in price by the time you could just build another nuclear plant. That's why really nobody is trying anymore.
Is that still true for mass produced SMRs ('small' modular reactors)? That don't rely on special forges, of which we don't have much? Isn't that the promise of all those startups from the sector? Regardless of exact model and technology? True production lines like in shipyards, maybe more airplane-/carfactory like?
Instead of almost 'artisanal' 'one-offs', like it is now, even though they have common design elements?
When someone is exposed to radiation and dies of cancer many years later it’s impossible to know whether he’s a victim of radiation or just unlucky. As simple as that.
Do you think those aren't solved problems? First, fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years. [1] And even to answer your original question directly, there's a whole area of study that's fascinating on how to provide long-term warnings. [3]
Not necessarily in the Australian outback, Yucca Mountain is a great choice. [2] [edit](That area is adjacent to the Nevada Test Site which is already some of the most radioactive land on earth).
What greed exactly are you talking about? I've no financial interest in the success of nuclear power. I recognize it's more expensive than some competing options but it's a better solution.
As for hubris, again, you're not exactly coming to the table with data on the risks, especially since we've got 80 years of experience with nuclear power.
Exactly right. The goal with nuclear waste is basically to get it back down to levels similar the original ore. At that point, it isn't especially dangerous.
Many radioactive products are either very short lived, and will decay down to minimal levels within a few hundred years, or are very long lived, causing very low radioactivity.
The problem are the elements that are in between which is mostly the other actinides. Those are the ones that would require tens of thousands of years or more to reach safe activity levels. Fast reactor designs don't have significant amounts of such elements in the waste. The waste will decay to uranium ore-ore like levels within only hundreds of years.
The biggest issue is that they need relatively enriched uranium to operate at first. After they are started, they can be used as a breeder reactor that can take in natural uranium and convert it to the enriched uranium it needs to continue running.
Fast reactor inherently have more fissionable material in a smaller volume, and don't have a moderator that can either keep things separated or remove itself in an accident to kill the chain reaction. If a supercriticality on prompt neutrons alone occurs in a fast reactor the neutron population will increase orders of magnitude faster than in a thermal reactor, because the neutrons are moving so much faster.
Edward Teller in 1967 famously expressed his skepticism about fast reactors because of this safety issue.
That's not the argument I was making. I said anything of sufficient scale carries significant risk, and we can in time reduce that risk to acceptable levels via engineering practices and principles. As with airplanes, which are metal tubes full of humans we load up with kerosene and send into the atmosphere. A bad plane will crash, a bad reactor will melt down. We can overcome the risks to reap the rewards. That's like our whole thing, as humans.
Chernobyl happened for a very specific reason - you know, the late-night tests and the positive void coefficient. Do you think we haven't learned? Please cite sources. The thing is, we have learned. That's why reactors are so expensive. You're double-dipping by citing the risks and the costs. It's really one or the other if you're not being disingenuous.
It's not the argument you were making, but it's a point your argument is compelled to address. Yes, any system of sufficient scale carries risks. In the case of breeder reactors, one of those risks is the possibility of something approaching an actual nuclear explosion, with fast neutron physics similar to what happens in actual fission bombs, not pitiful low yield moderated explosions as happened in Chernobyl.
> fast reactors yield waste products that principally live only a couple of hundred years.
Hundreds of years is not acceptable. Humanity is not able to handle projects spanning hundreds of years time. Look at the Zaporizhia atomic energy site for an extreme example of what I mean.
The problem is not just the time scale either. There are other areas humanity fails at time and again.
P.S. Thank you nevertheless for pointing out several advantages of fast breeder reactors.
> The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power.
Which is even more ridiculos because heat is the primary product of nuclear reactors. Their thermal rating of a nuclear reactor is about 3x the electrical rating.
Yes, for example Switzerland uses two of their nuclear power plants for district heating [1][2]. China has also started using it for district heating in Haiyang [3].
"Russia, Dec 1, 2019 — Unit 1 of the Leningrad 2 nuclear power station in western Russia has been integrated into the heat supply system of the city of Sosnovy Bor"
> The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.
Heating problem IS a power problem given the high efficiency of heat pumps nowadays. And yes they work perfectly fine in Germany's relatively moderate winters.
Only in the most abstract sense, if you're willing to ignore actual installed capacity (and thus reality to some degree).
There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc).
There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix this by 2050.
So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity crisis.
EU has an yearly report of the state of the energy grid, and a common finding is that different country spend subsidies on different things. Germany spend most of any country, and they spend a bit half of that on production of renewable energy and the remaining split between fossil fuel and shared infrastructure like power lines. Very little of the subsidies goes to the consumer side.
There are however countries who focused on the infrastructure/consumer side of the equation. When communal or heath pump based heating is significant cheaper, suddenly people interest to invest into home improvements goes up. As the report describe, it not obvious which strategy is best in order to reduce pollution.
What's happening in Germany is unfortunate, But I feel that while rebutting the statements of Anti-Nuclear Energy institutions with science people often forget that in the end humans run the reactors and the safety/efficacy of a Nuclear reactor also depends upon the people who run it i.e. even the stringent of safety protocols & design choices can be rendered useless by corrupt imbeciles(As we've seen in the past).
So we should be careful in appropriating the overwhelming evidence of Nuclear Energy being safe and efficient to reactor in X vs Y.
Nice idea to shrink "Zukunftstechnologien" down to solar at the end of the argumentation...
The problem with nuclear is that companies will not have to pay for final storage of the waste. Tax payers will have to pay forever. Same shit with our german coal mines. Take this into your equation. Google "Ewigkeitskosten"
- LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue.
- maybe you keep the existing nuclear around for levelling, well, fine. But just be ready for it to get "nuked" once the battery/storage costs combined with wind/solar drop under everything. That day isn't today, and it isn't next year, but with cheap sodium ion and many other chemistries in active improvement... it will.
- nuclear waste disposal is solved... if you have a LFTR or similar tech to "burn" it. Otherwise, the usual handwave on nuclear waste is a telltale sign of "old nuclear", as are the people that say it is safe. Solid fuel rod designs are not safe.
I am not saying that LFTR should be the only path forward for nuclear, but the advantages of LFTR should be what a "real" nuclear solution has. LFTR is:
- scalable in size
- meltdown-proof (plug and pool where the liquid loses criticality)
- burns/breeds virtually all of its fuel, and IIRC can "burn" spend rod waste
- somewhat proliferation resistant
Again, I don't know if the LFTR design challenges are truly problematic, but the CAPABILITIES of LFTR should be a standard next-gen nuclear must be held to.
The Greens aren't correct generally in engineering or science, but what they are right about, indirectly, is the culture of nuclear power that grew up in the Cold War and attached to military needs for weapons isotopes.
Those political priorities overrode safety, good design, economic performance, and other concerns, and left us with the terrible solid fuel rod design.
LFTR got canned in the US in a backroom political power move, and the same nuclear establishment keeps it restricted from funds and research.
Again, I'm not saying LFTR is the "one true path". But its core abilities address the Green concerns: meltdown proof and virtually waste free. Those two aspects are the base table stakes a "next gen nuclear" would need. Maybe you have a combined reactor approach where one design produces from solid or pebble fuel, and then that gets fed to LFTRs for final burn off.
So I guess I would recommend Germany / France keep their nukes going for now, but view them as life support: these things are going away once battery/storage tech scales to meet the need, a virtually guaranteed proposition in the five year near future timeline.
For nuclear to be relevant long term you'll need the safety tablestakes mentioned, but all nuclear projects are 10 years out: you'll need a stable price to target/combat 10 years out from wind/solar, and you don't know that right now.
> - LCOE of solar and wind beats the pants off of nuclear and coal currently. If it isn't in Germany, well, that's a political and management issue.
LCOE isn't the only factor of relevance. That's partly how Germany got into its current situation, because LCOE doesn't account for intermittency.
To solve that you need a large interconnected grid and huge overcapacity of renewables (and even then you'll have some brown outs), or you need long-term grid storage, which still has limited options at this time. The LCOE of renewables is not so rosy after you include all of these considerations to achieve the same stable service as a nuclear plant. We might get there in 20 years, but we're not there yet.
Sorry but you and GP complaining about how policy prevented nuclear from being the backbone of energy supply, then totally ignoring the impact of policy on the supply of renewables, that is a pretty weak way to argue.
The politics in Germany have been pretty actively hostile to wind under the conservative governments. Check this graph I just compiled out of the stats from wikipedia:
Yeah, if you introduce legislation that "these people" tell you will stall the construction, then _exactly_ that tends to happen. The 10H rules and other BS from the conservatives were expressly and successfully introduced to stifle wind energy construction.
Whatever is coming, price is defined in Netherlands, look for Dutch TTF futures.
It is like price of oil - Brent futures minus some discount
> which leads to very high spot prices
Russian gas itself is not traded on spot place(s). It is long term contract, but price follow dutch futures. How this "price gouging" is done, could you describe mechanism?
I'm aware of that and it's summed up together with hydro etc. Why would you want to compare Nuclear with solar? I mean solar alone doesn't make much sense because it depends on daylight - which surely is great since most energy is used during the day and battery storage is getting increasingly deployed. But it's better to diversify and therefore rather consider the sum.
> 25% of the total was from coal, making coal the single largest but source for energy in Germany.
Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term.
Edit: also it's worth considering that gas and bio gas (the renewable version) power plants can be used during peak times because they can be started and shutdown quickly. That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves
Actually, nuclear plants can be started and be shutdown quickly. Most countries don't do that because a large portion of the investment cost is in construction rather than fuels, so lifting the rods is just a cost center unless the grid is extremely over saturated.
> Well yeah but it's getting phased out on the long-term.
Who will take responsibility for the pollution of that. Saying that it will be phased out doesn't actually mean anything. Every technology and building will at some point in the future be phased out when the time is right, the investments has been repaid, and alternative technology can out compete the old. Current solar plants that is being built today will also be phased out on the long term.
I mean there's a law for coal power in Germany, already since decades but the new add-on codifies that. They might be doing worse than France in terms of CO2 emissions per capita but far better than the US.
Since cost is mentioned:
"The cost of generating solar power ranges from $36 to $44 per megawatt hour (MWh), the WNISR said, while onshore wind power comes in at $29–$56 per MWh. Nuclear energy costs between $112 and $189."
> That's not possible for nuclear which provides base load - in fact they need to be shut down during heat waves
Google "load following nuclear" and also read the article in Wikipedia [0]. That will help stop false information. Summary: Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode and can go from full baseload to nearly "running on idle" in 15 minutes if needed.
These people are constantly invited to present these „Zukunftsenergien“ as opposed to the old bad nuclear in talk shows.
And yet Germany, after two decades and close to a trillion dollar in renewable energies, has one of the most expensive AND highest CO2 energy in Europe.
In 2021 the 6 remaining nuclear power plants produced more power than all installed solar capacity in Germany. 3 were closed at year end.
Now we are reliant on russian gas and the politicians still want to keep closing the remaining three nuclear power plants.
The same talk show people now talk about how we have a heat and not a power problem, so we don‘t need the nuclear power. We are still burning gas and restarted coal power plants.
It‘s ridicioulous.