The same speech actually mentions energy security [0], and the new government is planning to invest a huge amount into renewable energy and a deeper integration of the european energy market.
One thing that is often left out of the international discussion of Germany's domestic policies is that we actually put a law into our constitution to limit governments from making new debt... So if the current government wants to take on new debt for Defense and Energy Transition, it will have to either do some tricks (the 100B for the military is supposed to come from a different, special pot), or change the constitution again, for which they would need the votes of the opposition.
I suspect Germany (and other EU countries) approach to debt is gonna be based in tricks and stuff over the next few years.
A lot of the 90s era monetary economics that the euro is intertwined in has been collapsing as a dominant school of thought. Covid plays a role here, but a lot of it has been building since 2009 & the greek debt crisis. I don't think many are ready (especially in germany) to throw out institutions, even ethereal intellectual ones... but OTOH change has come. Military emergencies, historically, are pivot points for monetary infrastructure... FWIW.
Interestingly, I'm not sure the german constitution necessarily has to change. In some sense, the more conceptually radical solutions wouldn't require it. ECB debt, or at least the debt transferred to the ECB in the 90s, just needs to stop being considered debt.
> I suspect Germany (and other EU countries) approach to debt is gonna be based in tricks and stuff over the next few years.
Now if that doesn't sound like the ideal starting point to ever more lying into ones own pocket about money and debt.
> ... ECB debt, or at least the debt transferred to the ECB in the 90s, just needs to stop being considered debt.
Without diving too deep into what such a sentence means in practical terms .. purely semantically it sounds a lot like consciously ignoring some inconvenient numbers, hoping they'll magically dissolve.
It'll "work" for some time and by "work" I mean, people will notice the bad effects but still put up with unsound government budgeting .. but it's surely not a healthy/stable dynamic of an economic system.
Pair this looking away with what is basically an imperative (because of climate crisis) to not further _increase_ the worldwide output of material goods but _reduce_ it (as long as most products aren't climate neutral, which will remain the case for quite some time) and you'll look at a dire prospect concerning prices/inflation.
It’s a unique opportunity because it’ll force conservatives who are mostly to blame for the status quo to choose between Weak in defense and Fiscal restraint
Part of the speech the chancellor gave was also the announcement to build two new LGN terminals „pretty quickly“ in order to gain more independence. This of course goes hand in hand with a general push to more renewables.
You can import gas via pipeline (from Russia) or in liquid form (LNG) from Qatar and others. You need a terminal to deal with LNG which is under high pressure and very low temperatures.
It will take longer to move away from gas as an energy source. That will happen over next decade at least.
The idea is to use these to import LNG from the US and Qatar, so that these terminals together with those in France, Belgium and the Netherlands can be used to supply all of Europe with gas - including the countries in Eastern Europe, that currently depend on Russian gas even more than we do.
Germany has no long term storage for nuclear waste, it is sending 12.000 tons of depleted uranium-hexafluoride from its reprocessing plant in Gronau to a plant in Novouralsk, Russia, where its turned into uranium-oxide for usage in MOX fuel for fast breeders sometime in the future. Until then it is stored above ground, hoping the containment doesn't leak dust clouds. And those are the few parts of the problem that can be reused. For the vast majority of radioactive and contaminated waste, there is no such solution: there is no reprocessing decades old contaminated reactor parts that are replaced due to old age and material fatigue. The burial site in Asse turned into a disaster and the waste stored there is being digged up again, costing billions. Gorleben is on hold since it was build under the assumptions that lead to the Asse problem, Konrad is not even finished and already booked out, without even taking all of the waste that currently exists. So most radioactive, irradiated or contaminated waste is stored in "temporary containment" with no long term plan. Nuclear power is neither clean nor cheap: its lobbyists are just very good at pushing externalities toward tax payers and future generations. American nuclear industry is trying to convince people that their ocean dumping sites are safe and that the contamination of the Savannah river or the Columbia river are not a problem. Note that these are the same kind of people that argued in favor of leaded gasoline, fracking gas infused tap water and smoking tobacco. Nuclear waste is not a solved problem. And if you look at the other side of the supply chain, uranium mining is even worse. The mines in germany are closed, and most of what was produced there over decades was sold to the SU and USA anyway. Handling millions of tons of uranium trailings and irradiated pumping, mining and milling equipment is left as a problem for future generations. You think the selling price for yellow cake pays for these problems in advance? Think again.
It's like pointing out that car accidents kill ~10x more Americans a year than 9/11 did so why are we so obsessed with making sure you can't bring weapons on a plane? The real threat is giving every moron with a pulse control over a 4,000lb wrecking ball.
Logically it's absolutely true that inattentive drivers are a greater risk to Americans than airline hijackers but 3,000+ people dying in one day in one location hits a lot harder than 30,000 people dying mostly one or two at a time, over 12 months, spread out across fifty states.
How does all that compare to continuing to burn coal and gas and dumping humongous quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere?
Maybe nuclear waste storage is not yet solved, but it is a long term problem while global warming is already here. I’d rather work on storage solutions for the next 1000 years than fighting floods, hurricanes and forest fires every day.
Instead of investing hundreds of billions to restart a nuclear industry that failed to deliver what it promised for seven decades and created lots of problems of its own, Germany is investing in solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power production to find out what kind of issues those have (turns out wind turbines shredder insects en mass, leading to a different kind of ecological problem - there is no free lunch). Knowing very well that the EU will likely continue to require energy imports in the foreseeable future, Germany is pushing to import hydrogen instead of hydrocarbons, and a major supplier will be Africa. Instead of investing into irradiating our country, we invest into building sustainable power infrastructure with our southern neighbors.
We already know what is the issue with only scalable renewables (wind & solar) - unrealiability. Germany is doing pretty much nothing to scale up energy storage, so this all is just a fig leaf to burn more coal & gas (or imported "renewable" wood). See last autumn - when wind did not blow and sun did not shine as much, you were pretty much just burrning stuff to make electricity.
Hydrogen is a joke, just the infrastructure to distribute it will dwarf any costs nuclear could ever have. Not to mention production costs . . .
And you are already irradiating your country by burning coal, so no idea what do you mean by "Instead of investing into irradiating our country".
It's not whataboutism - when intermittent energy sources are offline you need to have either storage or backup energy source. Fossil fuel (or biomass) sources are good at spinning up quickly, so it makes sense to assume that pushing renewables without storage is effectively pushing burner power plants.
And observed practice in Germany confirms this. Or do you have real data pointing in other direction? Say, period of low output from solar & wind which resulted in anything else than using mostly (imported) fossil-fueled electricity?
i reject your attempt to conflate my position with a strawman and will not provide any data for that strawmans position.
But to entertain your argument: yes i agree that it would make sense if i, personally, had more energy storage. However i don't see how that is relevant to my point against investing (tax money probably) into reviving a dead nuclear industry.
As a side note with you, _Tev, on a personal level: sure we could have a talk about that "fig leave" metaphor and if there is some kind of conspiracy in german politics and power industry that profits from coal. We could talk about whether hydrogen "is a joke" or a worthy investment, but honestly your rhetoric makes me not want to talk with you at all, as i don't think i will enjoy it.
Back to the point: this constant reiteration of "it is either coal or nuclear" is a false dichotomy and answering an argument against the nuclear industry with "but what about coal" is what-about-ism. My point is: the german nuclear industry is/was incredibly dirty, with an unsolved waste problem, expensive, reliant on Russia, failed to deliver its promises for decades and by now it is deader then disco. The newest german nuclear power plant was constructed in the '80s. Trying to revive that industry is not an actual solution to the problems of our energy market. That is like trying to revive the soviet union to get rid of Putin. The way forward must be something else. And no, that does not mean i am in favor of coal, russian gas, or american fracking.
So you say i should invest into energy storage? Sounds reasonable, any more concrete pointers?
My knowledge about the nuclear economy of France is limited, but i don't think La'Hague has a UF6 defluorisation plant. I believe there are some in southern France but those are unable to handle the amount of UF6 France produces on its own, without buying more from Germany. Also, much like the german reprocessing plant in Gronau, the french plant in La'Hague is only a small part of a long re-processing and re-enrichment chain. It is a producer of "uranium de retraitement" (URT). Ask the French what they do with it, their "nuclear circular economy" goes through Tomsk in Siberia.
While I would appreciate that, this would be political suicide for the Green party involved in the coalition. While they want a lot less co2 they are also very much anti-fission.
Would that really make a difference? Europe gets about 10% of its total energy (ie not just electricity) from Russian gas. I find it hard to believe Germany’s 17 reactors provided that much.
It would make a difference, more electricity generation softens the demand for gas.
Would it make more of a difference than just using the same amount of money that would need to be spent to refit the old nuclear plants for longer use to build out renewables across the EU? No, not even close.
One might discuss prolonging the life-time of the reactors still operating and bringing back the ones switched off a few weeks ago. But this might be more difficult to do than it sounds, as their end-of-lifetime was planned long ago so they might no longer be in a state where you just could keep them running.
In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't make sense to go back to nuclear power. It is afterall a very expensive technology. It is much more efficient to go full in with renewables. And nuclear power does not work well together with renewables, as it cannot be controlled fast enough.
That's outright impossible. Not just on the political level - no one aside from the fascist party wants nuclear energy. The closed-down reactors are being torn down as we speak, it is impossible to put them back together. For those still running, we do not have the capacity to make new fuel rods for and to maintain the reactors themselves, they are at the end of their designed life time. And new projects are completely out of the question - the French and Finnish projects are many years and many billions over budget.
Meanwhile, the Netherlands are moving away from gas and are planning to build new nuclear reactors. Belgium has postponed the planned closure of their nuclear plants. France has decided to build new nuclear reactors.
France isn't building enough new reactors to replace all the aging ones - at best this can delay the exit from nuclear power. Whether Netherlands is going to see through building new reactors has to be seen.
That’s kind of a brittle take. Germany has suffered an embarrassment and is back peddling over the course of only a few days.
- From helmets to actual military aid to Ukraine.
- large increase in military expenditure instead of woeful inadequacy.
- reversal of Swift decision.
Why wouldn’t there be a change in energy policy if Russia continues its war in Ukraine? This huge reliance on Russian gas has Europe, and especially Germany, in this strange conflict of interest.
Building out nuclear plans takes years, many billions of euros, and considerable protest from wherever you install them. Installing wind and solar power is cheap and fast, in comparison.
It takes years because people like you in aggregate demand that it do so. Submitting plans, evaluations of those plans, comment periods, etc. etc. etc. only move so fast because that's how the process is set up. The process is set up to delay and deny because that's where the political winds blew at the time the process was created.
If political winds change to support nuclear then such processes would evaporate into something far more streamlined and efficient because they simply don't make any sense in the context of "we want to do this nuclear thing and we want to do it ASAP".
Lets imagine that the gas pipeline from Russia explodes due to war or Putin shuts it off. Is it still 'impossible', as in we'd rather freeze and have blackouts?
"Back in the 1970s, when France decided to switch from fossil fuels to nuclear energy, the climate problem was not even on the agenda. And yet, within about 15 years France had almost fully decarbonized its electricity sector and had electrified a lot of other stuff (such as electrical heating and high-speed trains). Countries like France and Sweden have demonstrated in real life that it is possible to eliminate fossil fuels without sacrificing economic growth and prosperity. The reason why the carbon intensity of German electricity, even after two full decades of Energiewende, is still more than five times higher than that of nuclear France is [...] because anti-nuclear environmentalists [...] have more political clout in Germany than in France and have convinced their political leaders that it’s an excellent “climate policy” to abandon atomic energy and close down all of their remaining reactors.
The largest, and essentially only, anti-nuclear movement that exists is it's own economics. Blaming "environmentalists" is a cop-out instead of facing the reality: If it was profitable private capital would build it, if not in Germany then in other countries, further reducing cost. As have been seen since the 1950s that is not the case, nuclear has never been economical to build.
Nuclear has a place to do what the French did, massive subsidies to achieve a national security motivated energy independence. With renewables at the fore front that argument does not exist anymore. Now nuclear only exists to share an industry base with naval reactors in submarines.
It is a highly political sector as well as a capital intensive one. You can sink as much money into your prep-work as you want, but if you don't end up getting the permits and regulatory approval, it is all for naught.
Contrast that to any other kind of power generation, and the regulatory uncertainty alone is enough to sink any interest in spending a large amount of money up-front on something so uncertain.
Half of the reactors the US ordered have ended up being cancelled due to the economics.
> By the mid-1970s it became clear that nuclear power would not grow nearly as quickly as once believed. Cost overruns were sometimes a factor of ten above original industry estimates, and became a major problem. For the 75 nuclear power reactors built from 1966 to 1977, cost overruns averaged 207 percent. Opposition and problems were galvanized by the Three Mile Island accident in 1979.[48]
> Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.[53]
"If it was profitable private capital would build it"
Ah yes, the magical private capital, we should trust in it's infinite wisdom and do no national policy or planning ourselves.
Thats why the greatest infrastructure projects, like tbe hoover damn or interstate highway system, or Netherland barrier system for holding back the sea, are all private capital, right?
Electricity is a commodity, it does not matter how it is produced. The examples you bring up are something which is purely sunk cost, but is a benefit for the common good of the population which are exactly the projects governments should get involved in.
The auctions for off shore leases for wind power are getting up into nuclear power range. This does not include the constructions of them. The capital exists, it simply seeks alternatives which can actually bring a profit.
"New York Bight Offshore Wind Lease Auction Smashes Offshore Energy Record with $4.37 Billion in High Bids"
And when will this private capital builds the multi-gigawatt energy storage required to go to renewable? My guess is never.
Yeah private capital is great at cookie-cutter projects, like buying factory-made pre-built windturbines or solar panels and operating them, this a low-risk operation and every bean-counter can model it's profitability in excell. But when it comes to developing new types of solar panels and suddenly without government research dollars there is zilch.
It is also nowhere to be seen when we need actually risky and difficult projects like build a massive hydroelectric damn or multi-gigawatt power storage which will be required to support these renewables. It is nowhere to be seen in Tidal and Geothermal, which you can't buy premade from a factory in China. It is also useless in keeping reserves of grain, gas, or any other critical resource.
So why should anyone take seriouslty this point about private capital if it only contributes in areas of least concern?
If the human race was sitting around for private capital, we'd have gone extinc by now.
The point is that nuclear is not risky or difficult. It is simply awfully inefficient.
The risky nuclear move, which states should take, is investigating the possibility of supercritical CO2 turbines and similar technologies. That is to get away from the dead end of boiling water into a steam turbine which haven't have not been economical for 40 years.
First steam turbines was out competed by gas turbines and now gas turbines themselves are having a hard time competing with the solid state components of PV or an axle right into a generator for wind turbines.
Given that we seem to have a nuclear accident every 10 years, which was always supposedly impossible to happen, it seems like we still haven't figured out all the edge cases. Combine that with that currently only ~500 reactors exist world wide, it paints a pretty bleak image.
We could have a nuclear accident every year and it still wouldn't equal the damage we are doing burning fossil fuels.
But as airplane crashes became rarer the more we flew, so will nuclear accidents the more we build and use nuclear power plants. The ones we have are a very old and early technologuy.
Why set the baseline at an accident a year when we have renewables?
The French famously had some negative learning by doing in their nuclear build out.
> The French nuclear case illustrates the perils of the assumption of robust learning effects resulting in lowered costs over time in the scale-up of large-scale, complex new energy supply technologies. The uncertainties in anticipated learning effects of new technologies might be much larger that often assumed, including also cases of “negative learning” in which specific costs increase rather than decrease with accumulated experience.
Good chance that Green Party received significant support from outside forces to derail a sensible energy policy. Relying on fossil fuels / gas makes Germany way more dependent on the US and Russia, then otherwise.
Nuclear also needs to be paired with gas to meet demand shifts. I'm not sure why nuclear supporters are so oblivous to this fact, they constantly mention 'baseload' but it seems like they may have only a vague understanding of what that actually means. The non-baseload also needs to be generated somehow when people are awake and doing stuff.
So how do we reduce gas use the most, building $X Billion nuclear or $X Billion solar, wind and batteries? The expert consensus is the latter.
Where do you get that from? There's a large interconnected grid that helps balance production imbalances over many countries and regions. During hot summers, when the water level in French rivers is low, Germany exports renewable energy to France (Germany, btw, exports more electricity to France than it imports). In the winter with low wind, Germany imports electricity from France.
Why the hell do we have these highly polarized discussions whenever Germany, France and electricity production comes up?
He made a plan for a new renewable energy push and started to visit every constituent state to discuss his plans. He is doing this hands on and pushing a strong renewable agenda.
There are already plans for laws which will force more investment and reduce burdens.
He definitely has an agenda but what is he doing? He does talk a lot, that’s true. Right now he’s only achieved rising energy prices (before the Russian invasion, through co2 tax increases) and stopping KfW-Bauförderung.
I am yet to see systemic renewable power source that is available to country like Germany (or Poland where we also have discussion about going nuclear).
All renewables available to us are considered supplementary (they generate power when conditions are favorable, eg. wind blows, sun is shining). But this means they can’t be used to maintain power grid.
Ofc you can try hydro or geothermal, but those depend on your river network, underground warm waters availability, as well as population density around country. Those work for country like Norway but in practice German increasingly relies on French nuclear power as systemic source to maintain their grid, and Poland (sadly) sticks to coal and gas.
Power density of the atom is unmatched by anything currently by a wide margin. It's a pure fact of measurable and confirmed science. Arguing against that is arguing against objective reality itself and that makes you medically insane.
The cheapness of renewable is due to its guaranteed prices by law. Once these subsidies end and the free market prices take over, you lose everything. Reason will take over sooner or later - bubbles can't be inflated forever.
Don't worry your head with the technical challenges surrounding nuclear tech. There are real scientists working on it, coming up with newer and better designs, not to mention the move to modular reactors which will further increase the reliability of individual modules (parts) and drive down costs.
Reality is such that the atom is the most potent energy source. If you don't like that, turn to medical help, because sure as hell Reality won't magically align with your desires.
And it's tragic beyond belief what has happened in Chernobyl, but that is on those idiotic communists and their total incompetence and arrogance. On this i can agree - some people are simply too stupid and should be limited to only solar cells and wind turbines.
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