Nuclear in Germany was in its death bed already by the nineties.
It was killed by the massive costs, also fueled by failed experiments in "next generation" reactors that are still further away from feasibility than fusion power. And, to a lesser degree, nimbyism.
It was killed as an easy boon for idiotic environmentalist groups (the german green party is one of the few which at times reached relevant levels of representation), which have done more against the environment than for it. It which was also supported by local trade groups as Germany has huge deposits of lignite (whuch is basically the worst coal available).
In no small part following greenpeace’s nonsensical switch from military to civilian nukes in a bid for relevance most environmentalist groups and green parties hate nukes with a passion.
Decommissioning plants you could keep in running order is financially idiotic since you’ve already performed the vast majority of the investment.
Environmental concerns causing cancer in Europe has a bit of precedence - see the push for diesel engines in passenger cars. These reduce carbon dioxide emissions (which act at the global level) at the expense of higher particulate and nitrogen oxide emissions (which affect the health of people nearby).
Fuel is only expensive in Europe because it's subject to special taxes [0]. Emissions standards are also (until recently with the scandals) relatively lax for diesel vehicles [1].
EDIT: also if you look at the fuel prices link, notice the production cost of gasoline is generally lower than that of diesel in most countries, but after taxes diesel is cheaper.
at least in france, the tax rules based on horsepower and co2 were strongly favourable to diesel cars (as they emit less co2 and have better performance at similar hp), which led to insane stuff like putting a diesel engine in a smart car...
Well, the green party never advocated for using coal instead. Of course, you cannot abandon nuclear power, then destroy your rising solar industry, then destroy your wind industry (first onshore, than offshore) and finally also abandon coal and gas. While playing games with biogas & hydropower and reducing support for alternative heating systems like wood pellets. All of that seems to be the current plan of the conservative party. The green party had a plan and it was on track until about 2010, 5 years after they lost power. Since then, its all gone down. But blaming that on a party in opposition is at minimum unfair, if not stupid. All at the cost of more than a hundred thousand industry jobs.
> the green party never advocated for using coal instead ... blaming that on a party in opposition
They had the choice of achieving an exit from nuclear power or from coal power. They chose the former when they pushed through the Atomkonsens in 2002 when they were, in fact, a governing party.
Now Germany has lost pretty much exactly as much power generation from early shutdown of nuclear plants as they are running in terms of coal power generation.
They were a governing party with 1/6 of the votes in a coalition with a party that to this day delays the exit from coal because 'jobs'. In an economic crisis when the word greenhouse gases (and not yet climate change) was not prevalent at all. In retrospect, you are probably right. But at the time that simply was impossible.
> Now Germany has lost pretty much exactly as much power generation from early shutdown of nuclear plants as they are running in terms of coal power generation.
And exactly that is not because of the green party. The green parties program from 2005 outlined the end of coal subventions for 2012. The status quo is 2038.
It doesn't matter how many votes they had (1 would be enough). They were necessary for forming the coalition, therefore they could extort other larger coalition parties to give in to their demands.
Yes, this cannot be overstated. You can be pro or anti nuclear power, that is actually not the important part. The Green Party was (at most) the smaller partner in the governing coalition, but only for a short time (8y) in the last.. 40 years and as patall wrote, solar and wind has been completely sabotaged by the leading parties since then and reading the news you get a feeling that indeed the automotive lobby is one of the key drivers (pun not intended) of our environmental plans.
The green party is part of the government here in Sweden and the current energy plan is to use renewables when weather conditions is optimal and then to use in non-optimal weather conditions:
Subsidized gas and oil under the umbrella term "Reserve energy plan".
Import energy from coal, gas an oil power plants from neighboring countries and expand the capacity to import more during periods of high demand.
It only been months since the last public debate between the green party spoke person and the opposition, and in that they reiterated that the plan for the future is to use fossil fuels as the only economical viable option compared to nuclear for periods of non-optimal weather conditions. Nuclear is too expensive compared to fossil fuels. In some later debate articles they further expanded that the plan is to use fossil fuels until the technology to create green hydrogen has been made cheap enough to be economical viable (date undetermined). If I remember right they cited the German green party as inspiration, through I could be wrong on that part.
We do not have to think about weather, even the day-night cycle produces very strong differences in energy demand. Now what does the nuclear power house France do to counter this change in demand? Hint: it is (to 99%) not to regulate nuclear power. E.g https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=FR&...
There are limited sources of variable energy like some hydro, biomass, storage or ... (some) fossils. Nuclear is very bad as a variable energy source and therefore, aside for nuclear carriers, nowhere the only source of power. It would be nice if it were, but it is not.
> Now what does the nuclear power house France do to counter this change in demand? Hint: it is (to 99%) not to regulate nuclear power.
Nukes are baseload, you don't vary those plants' output when you don't have to, especially when you can use the consumption downtime to refill the pumped hydro.
> Nuclear is very bad as a variable energy source and therefore, aside for nuclear carriers, nowhere the only source of power. It would be nice if it were, but it is not.
Literally nobody but you even hinted that nukes could (let alone should) be the sole power source.
Parent suggested that Sweden would not need fossil fuels when using nuclear power to stabilize their grid. And I pointed out that not even France is doing that. You are right, there are some days where they vary the plants output up to 50% of the daily change in demand. Still, even in the days you picked, they are running 5% on gas. Even though, as I understand it, they have enough nuclear plants available to reach 100% at all times. Why is France praised in this forum while the parent criticizes Swedens green party for wanting to do the same: using fossil energy as a backup?
To explain why Sweden wouldn't need fossil fuels if they had more base load, while France has a bit harder time to do the same, is that Sweden has a significant higher ratio of hydro power. The water reserves can do a pretty good job at stabilizing a power grid. Without a lot of base load you do however need a lot of capacity to cover periods of non-optimal weather conditions, and the combination of increased demand and decommission of nuclear power plants has managed to make demands exceed well past what the Swedish water reserves can produce. As such we now have a focus on fossil fuels to solve an issue we haven't had in the past, with the green party steering.
Why do I criticizes Swedens green party for wanting to use fossil energy as a backup? Pretty simple answer to that, and I will use an old green party slogan to do it. Keep it in the ground! We won't reach the climate goals if we burn fossil fuel for power and heat. The green party should have been the last ones arguing that we must burn fossil fuels because the alternative cost too much money. Climate scientists has known for a while that we must keep fossil fuel in the ground, but what hope is there if even the green movement is advocating to digging it up and burning in order to save a buck?
Yet, somehow, power is cheaper in France than in Germany, and the energiewende investments cost about twice France's investment for its whole nuclear fleet.
Sure, new designs are more expensive, but I can't help but think that the main issue with nuclear is the impossibility to have a discussion free from disinformation.
A big part of the cost increase is also linked to political and social fears: after Chernobyl contracts dropped through the floor so there’s been a huge loss of knowledge in both building and designing new plants.
Plus designers tried to design even safer plants, meaning costs increase, meaning you want to increase power density, leading to further complexity and thus cost increases.
The would would be in a much better position if we’d kept building (and improving) Gen IIs as we tried to resolve Gen III’s teething issues.
In my view, the death of nuclear power in Germany started with the protests against the reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf. This is the start of a strong anti nuclear power movement that gradually won over public opinion. Unfortunately, I personally believe that a lot of the campaigning against nuclear power was perpetuating wrong or misleading information. There are valid argument against that technology, but the arguments that proved successful at swaying public opinion were borderline fearmomgering. And they have taken root to such an extent that a levelheaded factual discussion has become hard.
You may have read that Germany needs lots of coal plants, should build lots, or even is building, but in fact that isn't so.
There are lists on the German wikipedia of the coal plants being built/replaced/renovated. There are some small coal plants being built and mostly replacing older small plants at the same location. I don't understand either why they're being built or why the older plants were there, but who cares, they're small. And there's a single big plant being built. Perhaps. The company that's building it doesn't seem to be in a hurry to complete construction.
No matter how to assign output and add up the possible capacity, it's not enough to replace even a single nuclear plant.
Shutting down nuclear in Germany isn't "due to Fukushima". The legal basis was set in 2002 with plans that would have allowed nuclear plants to go on operating until an estimated 2015 to 2020 (it's about years of operation, not years of existence).
In 2010 the plants were granted an extension by the conservative party, 8-14 operating years each, depending on their age. 2011, after Fukushima, that extension was scrapped for the most part, reverting to the previous terms.
So yes, Fukushima accelerated the shutdown after CDU first slowed it down, but the original plan was for nuclear to be already gone by now. That there's still nuclear power going on until 2022 is due to several plants not operating for a while in the aftermath of Fukushima (due to operating life time being the relevant number).
That original plan also aimed for a massive build up of renewable power sources which has been sabotaged in much the same way (e.g. installed wind power capacity going _down_ due to messed up updated regulations: can't upgrade a wind mill in-place while simple repairs aren't cost effective). Cost us ~120k jobs in renewables, too.
Coal had full political backing though: Coal plants have been built illegally (with no political consequences), property has been seized to dig more coal (while the same conservatives pushing these seizures claim the eco movement wants to dispossess everybody), the 40k jobs related to coal are considered indispensable.
tl;dr: We're replacing nuclear with coal because politics sabotages everything else. Fukushima is just a footnote in that mess.
Nuclear was never really replaced by coal, it was mostly replaced by wind and solar, you might even say that thanks to Germany planning to shut down nuclear in the early 2000s wind and especially solar are where they are now and would be much more expensive if nuclear wasn't shut down.
My pet theory is that it wasn't really Fukushima, but STUXNET and mounting costs of waste storage - the latter was even a topic during my German lessons in high school a few years earlier, so I'm willing to believe that it was at least perceived as a problem.
I think the real reason is that the german environmental movement is closely tied to the former nuclear disarmament movement, and nuclear power had become somehow mixed up in it. It's a real tragedy
> the former nuclear disarmament movement, and nuclear power had become somehow mixed up in it.
Nuclear power was mostly interesting when it had weapon grade materials as a side product. It also explains why that horribly expensive mess has been subsidized the way it has been. "A simple power source" would have had to face competition by other power sources, but these others can't help equip nukes, so nukes-making nuclear power plants have been the focus.
>>Historically, if a country wants to produce a nuclear bomb, they build reactors especially for the job of making plutonium, and ignore civilian power stations.
It's sad that people want to risk giving up a good chunk of their country for a while due to a nuclear accident.
Yes, the engineers and scientists all say those accidents can't ever happen. Then they do. And again. And again. Fukushima wasn't even "that bad" but terribly expensive and inconvenient.
Sure they are, nuclear consequences are worst if they really blow up, and some always will. And what about the trash... I don't think it's greener energy than coal...
No, if you add up all the people who died due to nuclear accidents it’s still insignificant compare to coal.
Of course there are no hard numbers, but according to estimates over 30k people in Euorope & the US die because of coal (800k) globally. By comparison Chernobyl caused 4000–16000 deaths over several decades.
That's not a valid comparison. Nuclear energy accounts only for a much smaller amount of energy production.
It's a very weak argument to just wave your hand over how to multiply nuclear energy by one or two orders of magnitude, without major incidents, without nuclear pollution, and without the nuclear waste problem getting more out of hand than it already has.
I mean, you can think what you want but you’re objectively wrong on literally every metric except initial building costs and lining the pockets of private companies and investors, and it’s really not hard to find that out.
> Only if you ignore mining the stuff, storing the waste and decommissioning old plants.
Coal mining, owing to the volumes involved, is significantly more damaging (entire regions remain visibly devastated despite not having had any coal in a century).
Storing the waste has only ever been a NIMBY issue, the volumes are basically non-existent — unlike the tailings and terrils from coal mining.
Decommissioning old plants is also pretty much a joke.
> Nuclear power is somewhat greener than coal, but not that much and has different problems.
Nuclear power is orders of magnitude greener and safer than coal, and we now know that in the worst case scenario it gets greener because turns out human activity is observably worse for wildlife than increased background radiation.
What do you mean by "no plan to store it long-term"? We do store it long-term. It's vitrified, then sunk into underground concrete bunkers in geologically stable areas.
The cost in human lives related to coal exhaust is of multiple factors higher than that of nuclear.
The potential for an extraordinary damage is there in the old nuclear plants, yes. However, closing them down with no plans to build newer ones (with evolved designes) is just giving in to scare tactics.
At this point, we need all the low emission tech we have. That includes nuclear.
You might feel different if you live in a smaller country and all the infrastructure, including long term storage (usually called "temporary storage") is right next to you.
At the moment, nuclear power is an incalculable credit card. We can reduce emissions by building more nuclear power, but the bill will eventually come due because it is so hard to get rid of it.
I'd be for new nuclear power technologies that produce less waste. But the current technologies really aren't sustainable. Coal isn't sustainable either, but at least you can stop it more quickly.
However I would rather take the uncertain potential damage in the future, rather than the certain quantifiable damage today.
There are (and have existed since even before the first commercial plants were ever built) plans and designs for reactors which work on different principals than those we have built in the last 70 years (for example liquid salt reactors).
Some of these are currently being prototyped further today.
There is also the potential for the stored up waste from the last 70 years of nuclear power production to be used in so called breeder reactors.
All of these options however are not without flaws, and do produce toxic waste products (just with much shorter and manageable half lives).
Nuclear power does though require long term planning by politicians (and a bit of a backbone), which given the current fear of this technology is sadly unlikely to materialize in time.
And to address the point about coal being easier to move away from; how exactly would you suggest we do that?
While fantastic, wind and solar energy is not as reliably as coal or nuclear. Hydro is very selectively available, and geothermal is relatively in its infancy.
Even the giant solar panel project that Malaysia is planning to build in Australia (one of the most solar irradiated place on the planet) and which will be one of the largest in the world, is only expected to supply around 20% of their energy needs.
However much one may disslike it, the fact is that there simply is at current no drop in replacement for coal & natural gas burning other than nuclear.
It will be decades until newer reactor designs are proven and deployable.
All the reactors built today will have a lifetime of the old problems - incidents, storage, etc - for decades to come.
The uncertainty of wind and solar energy is overblown. There are ways to mitigate those problems.
Major polluters are in developing countries and those with poor regulatory regimes. Even ramping up nuclear production in relatively "clean" industrialized democracies is a risking "slippage" in terms of accidents, nuclear material getting in the wrong hands, getting disposed of improperly or being abused. Nuclear material in the ground water anywhere would be a catastrophe. There is currently an iron fist around the nuclear industry to prevent such things, and that is incompatible with replacing all or most of the fossil fuel production in the world...
> It's sad that people want to risk giving up a good chunk of their country for a while due to a nuclear accident.
The current alternative is losing large parts of the whole planet due to climate change. Even if we don't factor the extreme events it creates, air pollution from coal kills more each year than all nuclear events related to power generation ever.
I mean, sure, there are significant drawbacks to nuclear power, but that's like talking about lead paint issues in a burning house.
The TLDR is: 7 million people die anually from air pollution. Fukushima and Chernobil combined don't even put a dent on that. And solar+wind alone is not enough.
You can't replace most of air pollution with nuclear power.
And increasing nuclear fuel and waste production to anywhere near the necessary levels should give any environmentalist nightmares. Things do go wrong, and it's ridiculous to believe the required scale up would be possible with the current high regulatory standards. Especially with some of the major polluters not being known for their absence of corruption...
> You can't replace most of air pollution with nuclear power.
It can replace most of coal-based electricity generators. It cannot replace everything. It needs solar, wind, and whatever else we can come up with (recycling, increases in efficiency, etc.)
> And increasing nuclear fuel and waste production to anywhere near the necessary levels should give any environmentalist nightmares
Waste is also discussed on the video, near the end. Coal's waste goes directly into the atmosphere, where it does harm and cannot be easily captured back. Things are already "going wrong" with that. When solar panels end in landfills, they bring a lot of heavy metals (like cadmium). If "things go wrong" those also are a nightmare.
So, yeah: we are already on an environmentalist nightmare. The question is what do we do from here.
Radioactive material in the ground water or food cycle would be much worse than anything related to coal burning. And there are several ways for it to get there unless there is an iron tight fist of regulation and compliance. Even then, it has happened.
And your argument assumes replacing all fossil fuel with nuclear power, which means all the developing countries, all the dictatorships etc handling lots of radioactive material. I'm sure they'll all be responsible with it and not let anything spill over to other countries, right? And that's even assuming best intentions.
I'm not a fan of fossil fuels. I'm grudgingly on board with my countries plan because nuclear power is no sustainable option for us. Both politically and technologically. We can get rid of coal plants a lot faster than we can decommission nuclear plants and store the waste...
As Germany is vilified so much in this discussion: I live in Germany and there is no deadly smog in Germany. I'm too lazy to look up if our air pollution is generally better or worse than in France, but in general, air pollution here is driven by traffic, not coal plants.
Nuclear power, in its current form is not sustainable, both because of recurring accidents leading to political issues and because of the unsolved waste storage problem.
The bottom line: We want to go to mostly renewable energy sources, and the shortest path leads, unfortunately, through more fossil fuels. We need to increase energy production. We would also need to replace our old nuclear power plants with something. If we replace those with new nuclear power, we will eventually have to decommission and replace those (and deal with all the waste). Coal plants are easier and faster to ramp up and ramp down. I don't like it. But there it is.
Point is: Air quality in Germany isn't really that much of an issue, certainly there is no significant difference to France, while Germany has more industry and a higher GDP.
>>Only 50 premature deaths in France in 2013 could be traced to domestic coal-fired plants. The remaining 1,330 were cross-border, the majority from German plants.
Europe has a population of 746.4 million. So no, 34000 deaths/year that are attributable to air pollution, or 3000 of about 80 Million, is not a big deal, considering that both air pollution and coal power are currently a necessary evil to keep the economy running. The economy is what keeps all those people alive, by the way. Cut that economy by even a few percent and it will cost many more lives.
And those lazy comparisons somehow imply you could replace all that pollution with nuclear power, over night, or even at all. You can't. Some industries depend on burning coal, so are even harder to switch. Transportation is nearly all fossil fueled, so that would take a decade or two to electrify. All that takes extra energy investment (burning CO2 etc) to realize. And then you need to ramp up nuclear power. With all the problems that come with it. Probably have to relax some safety regulations to encourage the industry to grow quickly enough.
Germany is a free, democratically run country. Nobody wants to have a nuclear facility in their vicinity, much less a long term storage. People aren't stupid, they know accidents are extremely rare, but if they do happen, they pay the full price. And even long before, their property prices plummet. And after several "this will never happen accidents" actually happened, "there will be no accidents" doesn't hold all that much weight with the people. All that alone makes it virtually impossible to start new projects.
>So no, 34000 deaths/year that are attributable to air pollution, or 3000 of about 80 Million
Attributed to coal-fired-plants alone, please read.
>And those lazy comparisons somehow imply you could replace all that pollution with nuclear power
Lacy reading i the bigger problem on your side, and yes replace coal-fired-plant with modern nuclear power (or anything else) would ZERO those 3000 death ATTRIBUTED TO COAL-FIRED-PLANTS.
>Germany is a free, democratically run country. Nobody wants to have a nuclear facility in their vicinity.
As a Swiss i see the "free" and "democratically" thing a bit different than Germany, how much can your citizens influence European made law?
And Nobody wants to have a coal-fired-plant in their vicinity too....i hope, the difference of objective and subjective danger. Nuclear power is objective danger but in reality negligible, coal power is subjective, you think oh that's not dangerous yet with every breath you suck it in.
Let alone destroying vast forests to dig out more coal and make that coal then artificially cheap. Here's your brown-coal proudly sponsored by your government ;)
BTW: Death from air-pollution (over all, NOT just from coal-fired-plants) in Germany is a "little" bit higher (~71000 in germany, 403'000 in Europe):
You still can't replace all air pollution with nuclear power. And nuclear contamination is still worse than any coal contamination if it ever occurs. Any nuclear accident on the scale of Fukushima or even Tschernobyl would take a reasonable chunk out of our GDP because of the exclusion zone, even if the death count would be neglible as you seem to think.
If a majority of voters think this small risk of gigantic damage is not worth taking, you eventually have to accept that. Coal is not the future, it is a stop gap measure.
>You still can't replace all air pollution with nuclear power.
No one ever said that, however it's still tumbling around in you head for whatever reason.
>And nuclear contamination is still worse than any coal contamination if it ever occurs.
Future generation would probably say that a CO2 saturated atmosphere is worse...Earth is the new Venus.
>If a majority of voters think this small risk of gigantic damage is not worth taking, you eventually have to accept that.
And if china builds Nuclear and Coal power plants you have to accept that too, and if N.Korea trows a ICBM into your country you have to accept that too, but i think thats not the discussion, the fact that Germany believes it's green when in fact they are brow (from the coal) is just laughable, and even sell that power to other country's, coal plants are there to make money and not as a "stop gap" and you get the "fresh" air.
>Coal is not the future, it is a stop gap measure.
Exactly wrong, "old" Nuclear power was the intelligent stop gap.
> As Germany is vilified so much in this discussion
I wouldn't care about Germany's problem if German politicians weren't trying to export it to their neighbours, whether by lobbying for energy transition credits not to be usable for nuclear, or by fucking up the spot power exchange.
> I'm too lazy to look up
Too lazy to look up actual figures, but not lazy enough not to post about it :(
