My personal blog with random notes, thoughts and blog posts. I don’t update it often sadly, but i like having my firstname @ my last name .com as my email address.
“Decades of anti-nuclear protests in Germany, stoked by disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, put pressure on successive governments to end the use of a technology that critics argue is unsafe and unsustainable.
Environmental groups planned to mark the day with celebrations outside the three reactors and rallies in major cities, including Berlin.”
It’s crazy that a country made up of seemingly smart people favor this. How did Germany evolve to be so anti-nuclear? Given the alternatives nuclear seems the way to go.
In Germany there is still no consent on where to put the nuclear waste. Without that and no other country willing to take our waste, this is a problem. The process e.g. in Switzerland worked much better. It may actually be the very critical thinking that made it impossible to run nuclear plants in Germany. Further the federal structure and the citizen engagement in many decision making processes makes it complicated. Btw, the same problem actually makes a lot of wind power plans stall..
They're aiming for 2030 now. Their biggest power producer has already signed up for this. Think there's still some plants in Eastern Germany that don't have finalized plans but they'll probably get there.
In the mean time they intend to build fresh new natural gas power plants by 2030 in order to reach 50 GW, up from current capacity of 21 GW. That will be a doubling of natural gas power plants from today.
That's a perfectly sensible thing to do as part of a decarbonization plan. You seem to be suggesting it's a bad thing, but you don't say why.
Here's a 100% renewables plan for Germany that involves building gas capacity of 60% of peak demand and using it and synthetic gas made with renewables as "storage":
They also provide numbers for doing it just with batteries, and suggest it would only be 2x as expensive. The numbers are a few years old now, so prices and tech have moved on since.
Other people now suggest massive oversupply of wind and solar combined with mass EV rollout will make it cheaper to just use batteries, which I generally lean towards:
But either way, it's not unexpected or weird to build gas capacity when trying to wean yourself of fossil fuels and energy imports. What's important is details like how much you use, whether you capture the carbon, and how you source the gas and whether you are rolling out renewables, heat pumps and EVs sufficiently fast.
Increasing burning of natural gas might have been sensible before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Today it makes the German energy grid one of Europe most expensive grid, and the amount of subsidizes the German government is spending makes practically everything else cheap in comparison. The German government are paying their citizens bills, lower taxes and subsidize most of the construction and operational cost of fossil fuel power plants. Just because the government is paying the bill does not make it cheap. How many more winters with government bailouts can people take before enough is enough?
Germany is not going to reach the European climate goals if they continue with building new natural gas power plants. They will also not reach the Paris agreement. It is "a bad thing" to continue burning fossil fuels!
There is a lot of technology that exists and future tech that they could be using. The German has instead chosen to use fossil fuels. If we are discussing what they could be doing, what they could make a political decision that when they ban production of new fossil fuel cars they also ban the construction of new fossil fuel power plants. This would be much more real than politician talking about solar and wind while at the same time building tons of natural gas power plants in the backyard.
> Construction of new gas power plants (CCGTs), contributing to Germany’s phase-out roadmap for coal. Equinor and RWE will jointly own the CCGTs which initially will be fueled with natural gas and then gradually use hydrogen as fuel with the ambition of fully to be run on hydrogen when volumes and technology are available.
> Building production facilities in Norway to produce low carbon hydrogen from natural gas with CCS. More than 95 percent of the CO2 will be captured and stored safely and permanently under the seabed offshore Norway.
> Export of hydrogen by pipeline from Norway to Germany.
> Joint development of offshore wind farms that will enable production of renewable hydrogen as fuel for power and other industrial customers in the future.
Hydrogen as fuel are expected to start to be used in the energy grid by the start of 2050 as earliest and more likely by 2080. They are not part for the actually strategy of the 2030 or the 2050 goal, and they are not part of the strategy to reach the Paris climate agreement. Their use is currently limited to only green steel production, and for now only in very limited trial runs which are heavily government subsidized.
The plans for carbon capture is also very far into the future, more likely to have a significant role in next century than this one. The only party that talks a lot of carbon capture is the fossil fuel industry, and according to them they would need around 150 billions in government subsidizes in order create the technology.
In both cases the cost is overwhelming too high. No one is investing into this except for government funded trial run. The ambition is obviously to use it in the future(tm). That sounds nice and is something politicians use, but its a fantasy if people think it will actually be used to reach the climate goals of 2030.
side note Language like "You seem to be intentionally missing the point" is pointless. You insult me, I insult you, it will just sound like children talking. Please skip it. If you have to address the author rather than the content, then simply don't write anything.
Hydrogen fuel is basically here already. It will be used for grids shortly. And saying that it will be 2080 before it happens is the same thing as saying no (real) climate change policy will happen until 2080. Even Tesla admits we will need it for grid energy storage. It is no longer something anyone can deny anymore.
One of current biggest project of green hydrogen in EU is the green steel project in Sweden. They received around 50 millions so far from the Swedish government and more from the EU funds. Their expected date of finishing is set to around 2045.
The experts involved in that project was asked this winter if and when they expected to see green hydrogen in the European energy grid in order to replace natural gas, and their reply was around 2080 and earliest 2050 before any hydrogen energy will be burned in order to generate electricity. It takes a lot of time to build up production, storage and pipelines, and even longer to go from small scale experiments to full industry scale. The current technology is still much more expensive than natural gas when producing hydrogen, estimated to be about 10% more per unit even after you include tax rebates and green credits. Their project wouldn't have been started unless they had received those government subsidizes, and the news reporting on it are predicting that the final price tag for the government will be a few hundred millions before its fully up and running.
But lets ignore that and look at the European Commission climate package in 2021. For the small price of €2 trillions of European subsidies then maybe in 2050 we would see the European grid being supply with enough hydrogen to make a difference in the climate goals. That was however before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a lot of the money intended to go into renewables energy has instead gone to pay for even more fossil fuels. Since then there hasn't been much talk about those trillions intended to be invested in green hydrogen, nor much proof that it was anything more than just talk.
The engineer that got interviewed, who worked at Hybrit, went through how their experimental prototype of a small production unit that they finished in 2021 did give them a lot of insight in the problems with scaling up production. The key problem they kept returning to is to get it profitable outside of government subsidies, and the next size up will provide a lot more experience in doing so even if it will fall far from actually supporting itself in terms of economics.
If we are going to use press released by experimental prototypes funded by government research grants, then why stop at green hydrogen. Fusion is already here! Here is an article from last year showing how they already produced energy from fusion ignition: https://www.llnl.gov/news/national-ignition-facility-achieve...
H2 Green Steel, the competitor to Hybrit want to get in with the government subsidies, and as a strategy they are pushing a more optimistic time table. The first buildings however have yet to go up on the remote site, which is a subtle hint that there is some politics involved. 2 years to build and construct a full scale production foundry, and the wind/solar farms, and the hydrogen production facility, and the storage, and the pipelines, and so on might be just a touch unrealistic. (this is the second link you gave)
Nuclear waste only requires a fraction of the space of what a single large coal mine? It’s still irrational to put you energy security at risk because it’s “nuclear”, especially while wanting green electricity.
Also a bit darker thought, but you’d think the chance of nuclear fallout zones that’d keep humans out would be adored by more hardcore environmentalists.
I think the sort of environmentalism on display there is more people rallying against what they don’t “comprehend”.
We tried to bury the waste deep underground in the 60s and 70s already. Let's say it didn't work out so well and now we are still planning how to retrieve it since the decision was made in 2013.
We have not yet found a geologically suitable site in Germany. In contrast to the less disturbed granites of Finland and Sweden, the formations occurring in Germany are more fractured and thus less suitable. Currently, several salt and clay blocks are being investigated for their suitability as repositories, but they have other problems. (Water solubility for salt and lower stability for clay).
"According to the report of the Repository Commission, the final disposal of highly radioactive waste in Germany will drag on well into the 22nd century. The commission expects the end of emplacement to occur between the years 2075 and 2130, while the "state of a sealed repository mine should be reached between 2095 and 2170 or later." Accordingly, highly radioactive waste could be housed in interim storage facilities until after 2100. At the same time, final storage costs are projected to range from about 49 billion to 170 billion euros; significantly more than the 23 billion euros in payments transferred by nuclear power plant operators to the government for this purpose on July 3, 2017."
Watching Germany do anything related to nuclear energy or waste is like the people in in infomercials failing to do very basic tasks. Get your act together.
I tend to agree. However, turning them off is partially exactly getting the act together.
The very big problem is that at the same time particularly southern German states fail to support renewables and power distribution lines.
So while there was a time line. One part of the time line was missed. So everyone decided to rather count on Russian gas as an intermediary solution with the known geopolitical consequences that followed.
PS: Strange twist: There is a German company that now wants to produce fuel elements for Russian nuclear power plants...
> turning them off is partially exactly getting the act together.
Only from an old-school deeply irrational fear of nuclear energy perspective. Now that we know how catastrophic climate change could be the rational choice would be to replace all coal and gas with nuclear. Germans also really need to understand just how critical cheap and reliable electricity is to quality of life and GDP. Germany is making very bad decisions for deeply ideological reasons divorced from any understanding of real world technological limitations.
> In Germany there is still no consent on where to put the nuclear waste
Dig a deep hole, put waste there. This problem has been solved for decades. Germany has no seismic activity either, so that should not be a problem there.
We did that indeed for decades and then it turned out that the site was unsuitable, because of water inflows, and now we have been planning since 2013 how to recover the barrels again. The beginning of the recovery is planned to start in 2033 and is estimated to last for decades.
It's not true that Germany has no seismic activity btw.
… but you can always build gas plants I’m sure. Same thing is true in parts of the US. Gas somehow doesn’t face the opposition of pretty much anything else.
Opposing nuclear energy is the same as supporting climate change because the only alternative to nuclear base load is coal or gas. This is why Germany emits 6 times more CO2 per kWh than France. If humanity was sane and rational we would have replaced coal with nuclear a long time ago.
Climate change activists opposing nuclear energy is like firefighters opposing water.
That is exactly my point. If humanity was sane and rational I wouldn't be concerned about nuclear energy, because I would trust organizations to deal with it. But I do not trust organizations to handle this. In countries with vast space radioactive waste management might be negligible, but in Europe contamination affects more people immediately.
> Climate change activists opposing nuclear energy is like firefighters opposing water.
Your concern over the risks of nuclear energy should be inversely proportional to how severe you think the risk of climate change caused by CO2 emissions is going to be.
THERE IS NO REPLACEMENT FOR NUCLEAR for powering a country with low CO2 electricity. All the countries with the the lowest CO2 per kWh of electricity generated use nuclear and/or hydro. That isn't an accident. Germans just refuse to accept this due to their almost religious hatred of nuclear energy.
Right? Nuclear power is some of the cleanest energy we have. With research developments, strong safety regulations, and a plan for storing the waste it produces, nuclear is a much better option than continuing to rely on fossil fuels.
What poor timing, too. With the war in Ukraine going on, now is not the time to be increasing your independence on fossil fuels, even if temporarily.
Don’t know if anyone can compare the impact of fuel wars vs impact of nuclear waste&fallout. Though I agree the former currently has a much higher effect.
Worrying about the 'risk' of nuclear waste while we emit so much CO2 into the atmosphere is like worrying about a hangnail while you have a huge tumor on your neck. Modern reactors have very thick containment shells and have zero risk of "fallout".
If the hangnail causes a sepsis, it’s fatal in short time albeit the risk might have been low. But what if the skin is dry and weak?
The German reactors were running on low maintenance because of the shutdown, anticipated for last December. Hence the risk of continued operation is worse than typical.
A large overhaul would be necessary to ensure usual safety.
Same question could be asked in the aftermath of an incident. The argumentation is not so straightforward if looked upon in detail.
Of course the question is if the reactors could have been „saved“ earlier on, but those decisions were made in 2010.
In the meantime, wind, solar and gas plants were built. Gas plants were intended to offset low output times in solar and wind. Gas plants can be quickly turned on and off unlike nuclear plants. Thats the reasoning.
> How did Germany evolve to be so anti-nuclear? Given the alternatives nuclear seems the way to go.
Nuclear power is currently by far the most expensive way to generate electricity. And this despite the fact that the insurance sum for the power plants is capped and the remaining risk is assumed by the state and the money that was invested for final waste storage will predictably not be sufficient either. Our early attempts for final storage since the 60s have failed and since 2013 we have been planning how to recover hundreds of thousands of barrels from a salt mine from which radioactively contaminated brine is leaking. And we have yet to find a suitable repository where long-term safety can be guaranteed.
We also does not have sustainable energy storage and that's the reason for burning more coal, while spraying everyone with radioactive ash from coal in the process. I find it so funny when you are worried about waste from nuclear power plants, while there are literal tons of uranium every year being exhaled into the atmosphere and stored on ash heaps under the open air.
> It’s crazy that a country made up of seemingly smart people favor this. How did Germany evolve to be so anti-nuclear? Given the alternatives nuclear seems the way to go.
Well Germany isn't a country of smart people. Was maybe, now it's just a country for crackpot bureaucrats and corrupt politicians.
Solar and wind are better alternatives today. They got developed to the point they are because of those same smart, sensible Germans investing in them early on.
Solar and wind could be better alternatives in the future. Today, Germany is among the European countries with least clean power thanks to coal and natural gas use — https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE.
Principally nuclear countries like Finland, France, and Sweden produce a kWh of power with 5x-20x less carbon emissions. The figures are even better in countries relying more on hydro energy.
The nuclear waste is a real problem, but a nearly inconsequential one compared to global warming and carbon emissions from coal and natural gas. We have geological storage and reprocessing methods for nuclear waste. Fast Breeder Reactors and Molten Salt Reactors can consume what's considered nuclear waste and the latter can produce short-lived waste (dangerous for 300 years instead of thousands), which we can definitely store.
The biggest challenges for nuclear reactors are political, both because people are against the reactors as they were unsafe/used for WMD production in the past, and because having nuclear energy tips the energy and power balance (countries like Russia would rather see Europe depending on their energy). The engineering and safety challenges are irrelevant in comparison.
The fact that the shutdown of nuclear energy in Germany is based on irrational ideological fearmongering and that it's doubly stupid to do so BEFORE having finished building up sufficient renewable energy generation and storage capacity, thus leading, at least temporarily, to a de-facto replacement of a sizeable proportion of the part previously held by nuclear energy with fossil energies like coal that are far more dirty (with CO₂ and other pollutants)…
… doesn't in any way change the fact that Germany has indeed been massively investing in renewable energies and has built up enormous capacities in that domain that account for a much higher percentage of renewables in the energy mix than the overwhelming majority of developed countries… and that those early and continuous massive investments by Germany have played a major role in bringing these renewable energies to the much improved viability, maturity and price level they now have.
There is no contradiction between those two facts.
Shutting down nuclear energy doesn't change the fact of Germany's investment in renewables but it DOES make it pretty pointless. They spent hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve zero reduction in CO2 per kWh.
renewable energy in a country such as germany need non renewable energy to work when there is no wind or sun. figure out if its better then to have nuclear or coal
And, apart from a covid blip, generally looks positive for most economies, and France and Germany don't seem much different, despite the differences in their electricity production.
I would respect such goals much more if they issued a ban against building new fossil fuel capacity, rather than having the opposite goal of building new fossil fuel power plants in order to provide energy when solar and wind has non-optimal weather conditions.
Such ban would go well in hand with the decision to phase out cars that run on fossil fuels in 2035.
YOu understand that Germany has been investing into wind and solar for decades by now and it's still extremely far from meeting its energy production goals, even though you wind farms everywhere in the country when you drive there? That should tell you something about the viability of this initiative.
Nuclear is a MUCH better alternative to coal, which Germany still gets about 1/3 of its electricity from. It would have made a LOT more sense to replace all coal electricity with nuclear.
Any chance you could summarize the prejudice single people experience? I believe you, but it coul save hundreds of people from googling it individually.
married people are given unofficial/unspoken priority for promotions at a lot of workplaces. there's a lot of reasons for this, not all of them positive for the employee.
You could replicate 84% of the publicly-traded side of BH with 8 US-based holdings.
But BH trades at 1.5x price to book... not sure if it's really worth it. But there's some VC-style genius in his non-trading holdings (e.g. GEICO and railways) directly held on its book or its <1% public holdings.
(Though the asset value of the railroads, railcars, energy, pipelines, etc. (not even including liabilities) is about equal to its AAPL holdings, which is all asset/equity).
Overall, if you want a set-and-forget investment, I'd still say go for BH stock.
Unless I goofed in looking up this information, BH has outperformed the S&P 500 since 10 years ago and since 5 years ago, and that's with the S&P's dividendends reinvested. A few years ago I think it was different, but then they made a lot of money on Apple.
I get that it’s supposed to get cars off the road, but the assistance without trade-in is way lower and IIRC just for very low incomes (under 15000 euros or so) for the national subsidy.
That means if you need bulk transport you get little to no help on a cargo ebike (which tend to be on the expensive side especially as they’re not ultra common yet), unless you first buy a junker to trade in.
I’ve had a $200 used bike taking me to work every day for almost 10 years now.
$150 in maintenance every year (I like to give it in to the bike shop once a year for maintenance, otherwise basic upkeep with a monthly 30 min tuneup has been just fine) and about $500 in total repairs and replacements over the years means I’m spending about $220/year adjusted over its lifespan. I’d challenge someone to find a transport option where you’d spend that little in 2 months.
That's not my impression, most people I know here in central Copenhagen ride old beaters that cost anywhere between 50-150 EURs, it's a balance between comfort and price: You don't want your bike stolen.
You don't want the expensive stuff if reliability is of prime importance. You want a 3 speed hub gearbox and a cro moly steel frame. Or in areas where servicing a real bicycle is hard to find, a mid range 1x8 derailluer system with bog standard rim brakes. It's not big box cheap, but the former have been being made for a century and are almost identical. New is about €200-500
In places with a decent bicycling culture you can get one second hand for a hundred euros or so.
France has access to shops called Decathlon, who provide extremely good value for money pedal bikes and some pretty solid aftersales service for them as well.
I know the COI members will downvote this, but I do not associate with people who constantly interrupt others. Because they’re often impolite in many other ways as well. I love my life not communicating with them.
And I think there’s a correlation between people who have a constant desire to assert dominance over others, and people who often interrupt. It’s like the earliest red flag for me. I know because I used to be a COI member a long time ago.
"I wish I had more friends, but people are such jerks. If you can just get most people to leave you alone, you’re doing good. If you can find even one person you really like, you’re lucky. And if that person can also stand you, you’re really lucky."
It's a very cultural thing I think. I see it I guess in movies but here in Canada (Montreal) it's kind of unthinkable to me, doubly so in French. Interestingly, words are much longer in French so interrupting should make more sense but it is not done, period.
I think it’s perfect as it is. I hope you ignore the people who’ll try to pressure you into adding libraries to making it look like every other bloated webapp on the web.
(just between you and me, I was planning on ignoring the suggestions for extra libraries and "modernisation"; also it's a feature that it doesn't use a gui form designer. ssshh don't tell anyone...)
This makes me wonder; how different would the COVID pandemic death toll have been if governments didn’t change anything? No travel bans, no lockdowns, etc.
I suspect many people would still voluntarily use masks, self-isolate, protect their eldery and take other precautions.
It would have spread very rapidly, overwhelming health systems utterly. Do you remember the mask shortage early on in the pandemic? Do you remember the oxygen shortage recently? Have you heard the news about nurses and doctors quitting because of burnout? Imagine all of those dialed up to eleven, all at the same time. Along with shortages of cleaners, orderlies, and basic hospital supplies.
Nearly all the people whose lives have been saved by treatment in intensive care units would be dead, and many more besides: accident victims, cancer patients, etc., etc.
The sickness could have spread rapidly enough that essential services were entirely out of action for long periods of time . No water. No power. No air traffic control. No road repairs. No trains. No food transport. All of these at the same time, for weeks.
Both Japan and Sweden were very hesitant to impose legally-compelled rules compared to most other developed countries. People behaved as you described. Though one can debate whether they would have behaved even more so with an order compelling.
In hindsight, I suspect the biggest factor was not whether it was compelled, but whether people could afford it. (Plenty of payments to stay home or keep workers home were still made in Japan and Sweden.) If your rent depends on providing black market haircuts, you'll still perform them despite the ban. And if you're allowed to do haircuts, but the government will instead pay you to stay home to avoid the epidemic disease going around, maybe you'll just stay home.
If you could get accurate data on the different strategies that countries used and their results you could extrapolate with huge error margins but it would give you a general idea. However, many countries did not accurately report: testing numbers, results, outcomes, well practically everything!
The survey was just 21 people "exclusively contacted in BIID internet forums". How many people who cut off a limb and regretted it would stick around the forum that fed their compulsion to do it?
> How many people who cut off a limb and regretted it would stick around the forum that fed their compulsion to do it?
Maybe many more then you would think. First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.
I agree that the evidence is not the highest quality but i have a hard time imagining a more involved study design that would pass by any ethic board.
> First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.
I don't find that the least bit credible. The proposition forum administrators would tolerate someone "warning others" against the core uniting aspect of their community is not realistic. Generally anyone who questions orthodoxy in such niche communities face vitriol and get banned quickly. Apostates do not hang around religious conversion forums talking about deconversion, gender transition desisters are not welcome on transgender support forums etc.
Then one could surely find multiple occurrences of externally archived but deleted forum post showing just that. You are implicitly asking for proof of absence of such censorship. This is an unreasonable standard.
Preventing motivated people from harassing others on a forum is impossible if anyone can join the forum.
I wonder if it's similar to Amazon ratings, where review distributions seem to skew toward people who either love the thing, or hate it? Presumably there's actual research on this. ... Okay here's something about the J-shaped distribution (mostly 5 stars, some 1 stars, little in between) in reviews [1]. (Edit: here's another, more recent summary [2] of polarity in reviews.)
Would we expect the same in something as intimate as amputating pieces of your own body? Hmmm.
Off-topic, but I think the effect is even more pronounced with a binary rating (thumb up/thumb down) vs a 1-5 star rating. I've noticed that really bad or mediocre games will take advantage of the upvote tendency by advertising "90% positive reviews" in an attempt to trick people into thinking they're good.
> Maybe many more then you would think. First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.
And how would you find those posts after they were banned and deleted?
Google tends to cache pages for a long time, banned users usually leave a long trail (and post on sites where they will not get banned) and deleted posts can be resolved by finding and asking the user in question. And usually people with regrets tend to be very, very loud in scenarios like this.
I skimmed the paper and couldn't find where they say they looked for those users and posts that you mention. Maybe I missed it, can you point me to where does it say they make an honest effort to find those people?
I wouldn't say that failing to at least try to look for the less-than-enthusiastic people makes this paper criminally dangerous pseudoscience, but it certainly gives me pause.
oh, I've run into one. a very unpleasant and mentally unwell person - I think his motivation was purely sexual, and not identity-driven. he creeped me out.
I personally know two, one who used the dry ice method to destroy their legs, and another who achieved paralysis. both are quite happy now, except for the pain and suffering they went through (particularly the person who paralyzed herself, since she caused meningitis which led to horrid nerve pain - but even then, months later, she's happier now that it's done.)
My personal blog with random notes, thoughts and blog posts. I don’t update it often sadly, but i like having my firstname @ my last name .com as my email address.